A New Jersey couple is one of the rising number of parents who are paying tens of thousands of dollars to guarantee a baby of a particular sex.
“It was my dream,” Janine Tardibuono told NJ 101.5 about paying $25K to guarantee her third child would finally be a girl. “And now I have her.”
Tardibuono and her husband went through the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process at North Hudson IVF in Englewood Cliffs that would ultimately screen their five embryos produced to guarantee the sex they desired. One of the five was a female, and was implanted in Tardibuono’s uterus. The couple’s daughter, Gianna Rosalia, was born without a hitch.
Dr. Jane Miller, medical director at North Hudson IVF, refers to paying to select the sex of one’s child as “family balancing.” She says the safety of the technology has led to an increase in the number of couples who choose the sex of their children.
“There’s been so much good, solid science that’s progressed what we can do in the embryo lab,” she told NJ 101.5, adding that she often works with parents from cultures who “value male children.”
According to the news report, the South Jersey Fertility Center says 10 percent of the pre-implantation genetic diagnoses (PGDs) performed are for sex selection.
Tardibuono said had the sex guarantee procedure not been available, she and her husband would not have attempted to have a third child. She admitted their families criticized their purchase of the sex guarantee as “playing with God’s plans.”
“But then my point was that God created these doctors and these people that do the lab work,” she said. “So if God created them, then their work is good.”
As the Daily Mail observes, the scientific advances that are permitting parents to select the genetic makeup of their children come at a time when the abortion industry is still claiming unborn babies have no right to be born.
“It is actually crazy considering the amount of time the whole abortion debate gets, and at the same time, we’re actually able to choose the sex and eye color of our children,’ HBO’s documentary series Vice correspondent Isobel Yeung told the Daily Mail Online, regarding the show’s episode on human gene editing. ‘It’s insane that that doesn’t get more airtime.”
“I spoke to several biologists and experts who predict in the next five decades we are going to completely change the way we procreate, so having sex for procreation reasons is going to feel a bit old fashioned,” Yeung added.
Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, founder of The Fertility Institutes, specializes in PGD. Though much of the technology is used to identify genetic defects within embryos to prevent disorders and diseases to be passed on to the patient’s child, Steinberg also allows his patients to choose their future child’s sex and eye color.
Currently The Fertility Institutes is offering time-limited “lowered pricing … for cycles with PGD gender determinations made until June 30, 2018.” The discounted fee is $14,880 plus some additional charges for medications.
Steinberg told 60 Minutes over four years ago that when he first began guaranteeing the sex of the embryo, it was only for couples who were undergoing IVF for infertility.
“Now, 70 percent of the patients would never need IVF, except for the fact that they want to do the gender selection,” he said. “There is an unbelievable drive in some of these couples that are interested in gender selection.”
Steinberg’s clients Deborah and Jonathan told Yeung they had chosen IVF because they were having fertility problems, but then decided to select the sex of their child as well.
“They felt quite strongly that they both wanted a girl,” Yeung told the Daily Mail Online. “They wanted to bring a girl up to be a strong feminist. They both felt like they had strong women in their lives and they wanted to emulate that by having their own daughter.”
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