GENDER SELECTION: THE FACTS

Gender selection is officially known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and was originally used to identify genetic disorders within embryos such as haemophilia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD).

The process has more recently been marketed as ‘family balancing’ and offered to people who wish to choose the sex of their child for personal rather than medical reasons.

Non-medical gender selection is illegal in the UK and parts of Europe but is widely available in Northern Cyprus and the US, where it has become a multimillion-dollar industry.

Leading US clinic The Fertility Institutes treated 640 couples from around the world in 2017 and 13 per cent were British. Another, HRC Fertility, reported ten patients from Britain a month.

Both the UN and World Health Organisation oppose gender selection for non-medical reasons. The WHO believes it raises ‘serious moral, legal, and social issues’ and can lead to gender imbalance and exacerbate sex discrimination against women.

The process begins like a standard IVF procedure: eggs are extracted from the mother and fertilised with sperm supplied by the father in a laboratory.

After a minimum of three days, fertility doctors extract several cells from the embryos. The cells are screened for both genetic diseases and desired gender. Healthy embryos are implanted in the mother and pregnancy and birth follow as normal.

Parents have the option of having any leftover embryos frozen for future use, donated to medical research or destroyed. The price of the procedure varies from £8,000 to £16,000.