The women paying $40,000 to have a daughter: America's $100m-a-year gender selection industry revealed



American families are increasingly picking the gender of their children - and they are choosing girls.

In countries like China and India, couples regularly use pregnancy screening to abort female fetuses but in the United States a different kind of sex selection is taking place.



Fertility clinics are targeting young, fertile mothers desperate for a little girl and more and more women are paying the exorbitant costs to get one.

Gender selection: American families are increasingly picking the gender of their children - and they are choosing girls (stock photo)

Gender selection or 'family balancing' now rakes in at least $100 million every year, with an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 procedures being performed.



Some families are coughing up as much as $40,000 for their little girl, according to Slate.com .



Under the procedure, the woman's eggs are harvested and fertilized with sperm samples collected by the fertility clinic.

After fertilization and three days of incubation, an embryologist uses a laser to cut a hole through an embryo’s protective membrane and then picks out one of the eight cells.

Fluorescent dyes allow the embryologist to see the chromosomes and determine whether the embryo is carrying the larger XX pair of chromosomes or the tinier XY.



The remaining seven cells will go on to develop normally if the embryo is chosen and implanted in a client’s uterus.

Lucrative: Women desperate for girls, are coughing up as much as $40,000 to pick their child's sex (stock photo)

Fertility doctors predict the procedure's popularity will continue to soar as couples become more comfortable with the idea of paying to choose their child's gender.



Doctors say girls are the goal for 80 per cent of gender selection patients.



This backs up a study published in 2009 by the online journal Reproductive Biomedicine Online, which found Caucasian-Americans preferentially select females 70 per cent of the time.

Meanwhile, those of Indian or Chinese descent largely chose boys.



Most of the evidence is anecdotal, as no large body tracks gender selection procedures.



But data from Google shows that 'how to have a girl' is searched three times as often in the US as 'how to have a boy.'



Many of the women desperate for girls explain that a yearning for female bonding was behind their decision to use gender selection technology.



Controversial: The procedure, designed in the early 1990s to screen embryos for chromosome-linked diseases, is illegal for use for non-medical use in Canada, the UK and Australia (stock photo)

'I’m not into sports. I’m not into violent games. I’m not into a lot of things boys represent and boys do,' Jennifer Merrill Thompson, author of Chasing the Gender Dream, told Slate.com, explaining her decision to choose the sex of her daughter.

Gender-selection patients are typically around 30 years old, educated, married, middle to upper class, and most have a couple of children - usually boys - at home already.



The United States is one of the few countries in the world that still legally allows prenatal sex selection.

The procedure, designed in the early 1990s to screen embryos for chromosome-linked diseases, is illegal for use for non-medical use in Canada, the UK and Australia.



But in the US it still has its critics.



The American Society for Reproductive Medicine is worried gender selection is leading otherwise healthy women to undergo unnecessary medical procedures and diverting quality doctors away from more worthwhile causes.



The group is also concerned children conceived this way could suffer psychological harm, if they don't live up to their parents' high expectations.



'If you’re going through the trouble and expense to select a child of a certain sex, you’re encouraging gender stereotypes that are damaging to women and girls,' Marcy Darnovsky, director of the Center for Genetics and Society, told Slate.com.

