Sex Selection and Gender Preference

We care about the gender of our children. Some of us care more than others, but we all care. At some point during early schooling, you discussed your future children’s names- one girl and one boy naturally. Admit it, you did. This was before a potential mate, before friends started having babies, before your sister had her pigeon pair.

From the moment a pregnancy is revealed, “Is it a boy or a girl” is the question on everyone’s mind. Any preference is usually disguised with a prayer for health but there is always a wish, a dream, a preference for gender . Now those of us who are used to taking control, the controls are being handed to us.

When speaking of Gender Selection in the United States, whether traveling to the US from abroad or living locally within, parents seeking to use currently available sex selection techniques prefer to have a girl. Estimates of 80% of those within the United States seek out Gender Selection methods for how to conceive a girl when searching the Internet.

Americans, unlike much of the rest of the world, do not prefer boys. Of the first 111 Microsort attempts, 83 were for females and 28 were for males. Shettles has even been quoted as saying that more families want girls. The ratio at Ericsson clinics has been quoted as high as 2 to 1 in favor of girls.

”Women are the driving force, and women want daughters,” Ericsson says. ”And they’re not apologizing about it anymore.”

The dream of a child and the dream of a son or daughter- what is the difference really? We all start out with a dream of what we want our future to look like and work towards it. Some of us hit some bumps in the road, some bumps might turn into a roadblock when it comes to fertility but it doesn’t diffuse the dream- it may open our minds to other possibilities and make some of us care less than others, but everyone cares.

Categories Elective IVF for Gender Selection, Natural Gender Swaying, TTC a Boy, TTC a Girl

Rabbis allow Gender Selection and believe in swaying too!

by Gender Selection Guru

January 3rd, 2013

From Algemeiner.com-

After years in which rabbis forbade any sort of gender selection at conception, a recent revolutionary Halachic (Jewish legal) ruling has now deemed it permissible to intervene and select the gender of a fetus in certain situations. The ruling was to be officially issued at a conference on Wednesday organized by the Puah Institute, which offers fertility treatments in line with Jewish law.

“There are three ways to select the gender of a fetus,” Institute founder Rabbi Menachem Burstein said. “The first way is the most natural, and depends on the man and the exact time the woman ovulates. Another method involves putting the sperm in a special apparatus to separate the male [Y chromosome] sperm from the female [X chromosome] sperm. The third method involves in vitro fertilization.”

According to Burstein, rabbis have forbidden any kind of intervention until now. ”It is considered to be the spilling of seed, and a gross intervention, which is generally unacceptable. But since the number of requests has been growing, and since sometimes the requests stem from a deep psychological need, it is possible to permit the second and third methods,” he said.

“We have come across cases of people who felt it was important to have sons to carry on the family line because of the Holocaust, or families with six or seven daughters in which the father wants a son so much that it threatens the marriage. In cases like this, the matter will be examined by the appropriate rabbis, psychologists and medical committees, and clearly a Halachic compromise can be reached. Jewish law is making incredible strides as medicine advances. It is easiest always to say no, but sometimes, if the rules can be eased or and if solutions can be found then we should strive for that,” he said.

Taken from www.algemeiner.com

Some Comments-

At GenderDreaming, we have to LOL at the “3 ways” part. First, timing has been disproven and cannot be used to select the gender of a fetus alone. Shettles was wrong and that just doesn’t work. Second, the “apparatus” they refer to has to be either MicroSort, which is no longer available in the USA or Ericsson which has never been proven to work. There is not one single independent review outside of the people that work at Ericsson that shows that it does anything at all.

The only way to guarantee the gender of a fetus is through IVF with PGD.

It is nice to see some acknowledgement of Gender Desire/Disappointment that some people have- the “deep psychological need”. That is very true and it is something that affects many people from all over the world. Most of the world outside of India and China are hoping to have a daughter through Gender Selection methods. Our community is made up of mostly women that desperately want a daughter to balance out their family dynamic. Of course, there are people that are looking for sons too, but it isn’t the men doing the looking, it is a process and decision that is spearheaded by the woman. That is the modern era of Gender Selection.

www.GenderDreaming.com 2013

Categories Elective IVF for Gender Selection, Gender Disappointment, Natural Gender Swaying
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PGD on Previously Frozen Embryos

by Gender Selection Guru

January 2nd, 2013

If you have ever been through an IVF cycle, you may or may not have ended up with extra embryos that you chose to freeze. It is estimated that there are around 500,000 frozen embryos in storage in the USA alone. When I am out with our family or three girls and a boy, there are countless instances where someone will say to us that “Had I known number 3,4, etc. would be a ______(boy or girl), we would have gone for it for sure.” Well, you can guarantee that number 2,3,4, etc. is a boy or girl and anyone that has been through IVF and has frozen embryos can test them and transfer their desired gender too.

In our GenderDreaming Discussion Forums, we have had new members join this year and do just that- test their previously frozen embryos- some frozen on day 3 and others day 5 and transfer the less represented gender from their current family makeup. Had this option not been available, those frozen embryos may have been discarded or frozen indefinitely.

Just like the technology for freezing embryos, PGD options have progressed greatly in the last few years. The older testing method, FISH, is being widely phased out and newer, more comprehensive and most importantly more accurate testing methods such as Natera, aCGH, PCR are yielding better results. They are capable of testing all 22 pairs of chromosomes plus X and Y. Pregnancy rates seem to be much higher when transferring all chromosomes.

So, maybe that is an option for you if you are lucky enough to cycle and have leftover embryos. We’d be happy to talk with you about the process and if your clinic doesn’t have the capability of testing embryos, we can recommend some that can!

Gender Dreaming Discussion Forum

Categories Articles, Elective IVF for Gender Selection
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Archive for Elective IVF for Gender Selection – Page 6

Gender Preference in the United States

Sex Selection and Gender Preference

Rabbis allow Gender Selection and believe in swaying too!

PGD on Previously Frozen Embryos