More boys are born after IVF (Image: Howard Breman/Getty)

DIFFERENT fertility treatments affect the ratio of boy babies to girls, and this could have serious consequences as artificial fertility treatment becomes more common.

So says Michael Chapman at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, following a study that compared different kinds of assisted fertility treatment (AFT). His team recorded the sex of all 13,368 babies born in Australia and New Zealand between 2002 and 2006 using AFT.

They compared two types of reproductive technology: IVF, which involves placing an egg on a dish with up …