Australian couple Jayne and Jon Cornwill desperately wanted a baby girl after giving birth to three boys, so they decided to take out another mortgage on their house and fly to America to be able to choose the sex of their next child.
“My husband wanted a little girl that he could one day walk down the aisle. I wanted that relationship — the bond between a mother and daughter,” Jayne said Australia’s Today show. She said that she suffered from something called “gender disappointment,” that felt to her like “mourning the death of a child you never had.” She said it was “like any other form of depression.”
She wrote about the depression she associated with this gender disappointment in Sydney Morning Herald, “My desire for a daughter caused me to spiral into depression and left me virtually housebound. Every time I went out, toddlers in pink seemed to taunt me.”
The couple paid $50,000 for pre-implantation genetic screening (PGS.) The process can only be performed along with in-vitro fertilization, which accounts for a large chunk of the cost. The ability to choose the sex of the baby while analyzing embryos selected during the IVF process is motivating many couples to choose IFV treatments even when they are not having fertility issues. “Our numbers have doubled over the past ten years — and these are happy, healthy, fertile clients,” notes Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, founder of the Fertility Institutes.
Would you pay to choose the sex of your baby?
