728x90
my iParenting
From Our Sponsors
e-newsletters
Sign up to receive our free weekly e-newsletters

new terms of use
new privacy policy
award-winning products
The iParenting Media Awards program helps parents find the best products for their families.
Home › Articles › Gender Selection and Family Dynamics › Trying for a Boy or Girl?

Trying for a Boy or Girl?

Use These Tips to Pick Your Baby's Gender

By Kelly Burgess

Pages:  1  2  3  

Kathy Varble of Tallahassee, Fla., is a expecting a baby at the end of this month. A baby boy, just as she and her husband wanted. The couple already has a daughter, age 4, and knew they were only going to have one more child. Although they would have been happy with either a boy or girl, they wanted to maximize their chances of it being a boy.

"My husband is the last Varble, and we really wanted to give having a boy our best shot," she says. "It wasn't something where we would have made the huge financial investment to guarantee a boy, but to try a natural method that really only required the cost of a book seemed realistic to me."

Gender Selection
The method Varble chose to try is outlined by Dr. Mark Moore in his book Baby Girl or Baby Boy: Determining the Sex of Your Child (Washington Publishers, 2002). Co-written with his wife, Lisa, a registered nurse, it details some practices that are generally believed to increase a couple's chances of influencing the gender of their baby. While there are no guarantees, Dr. Moore estimates that, if it's followed correctly, it has a statistical probability of working 80 percent of the time.

Dr. Moore's method is based on factors such as timing of ovulation and intercourse; there are other methods that involve more medical intervention. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis is a type of in vitro fertilization (IVF) that guarantees a boy or girl, but it runs about $20,000. It also raises some difficult ethical questions, as it often results in the production of too many viable embryos that need to be dealt with in some manner.

MicroSort, the newest technology, involves artificial insemination of "sorted" sperm, and runs abut $2,500 per attempt. The success rate of this method is estimated to be about 91 percent for boys and 76 percent for girls. While these high-tech options are intriguing, the cost makes them impossible for some couples. As a result, there is constant interest in low-cost, natural ways to choose your child's gender.


Pages:  1  2  3  

Want to see more?

Comments

There are no comments for this article yet.Be the first to add a comment.

Post As:
Enter your comment below:
Title
Comment Text
CAPTCHA
Please note that any comments submitted become the property of Disney Family / iParenting and can be edited and posted at our discrection.