American couple spent $100,000 to guarantee a baby girl!

07.07.2015

Excitedly anticipating the birth of child No. 3 in the fall, Rose Costa can’t wait to pick out some pretty clothes for her long-awaited little girl.

Costa is very passionate about having a daughter is an understatement thus the 36-year-old and her husband, Vincent, 37, have spent $100,000 on seven attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF) to guarantee a daughter after having had two sons.

Decision of young woman to pick her baby’s gender is part of the controversial trend of “family balancing” — determining the sex of an embryo at the lab-dish stage before it is transferred into the woman’s uterus.

Recently, Us Weekly claimed that Kim Kardashian chose a boy as part of her IVF procedure to treat fertility issues. Though she denied the report, proud husband Kanye West will now have a son as well as a daughter, 2-year-old North, by the end of the year.

Whether or not the couple underwent the $15,000 to $25,000 process for IVF with sex selection, the speculation fueled the debate about whether the screening is ethically sound or a slippery slope toward designer babies.

“It’s the entitlement mentality in overdrive,” says Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, an organization that opposes the practice (though more than 160,000 IVF procedures were performed in the US in 2012, the percentage driven by sex selection, which isn’t legally regulated, is unknown).

Countering the argument are so-called gender specialists, like Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg of the Fertility Institutes, who estimates around 85 percent of his IVF clients visit his Manhattan and Los Angeles offices purely for sex selection. The majority are American, but a large percentage travel from countries like the UK, France, China and India, where the option is banned.

“Most of them don’t have fertility problems — they want to guarantee a boy or girl,” reveals Steinberg, who has seen a 250-percent increase in demand for his services over the past five years. “It doesn’t matter if it’s their first or fourth baby — we take all comers.”

Costa conceived her sons, Gabriel, 15, and Igor, 13, naturally, but decided on IVF for her third child because she didn’t want to risk the chance of another boy. “All my life, I wanted to be the mother of a daughter,” says the brunette from Frisco, Texas. “I love my boys very much and wouldn’t change them for the world, but having a girl is really important to me.”

She first researched the options when Igor was 5 years old. “However, we wanted to be financially independent before we went ahead with the procedure,” explains the Brazilian native.

After a full cycle of IVF, the resulting embryos are chromosomally tested to determine their gender, as well as certain genetic conditions such as muscular dystrophy and Down syndrome, in a procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. Only the developing embryos of the desired sex are placed back in the mother’s womb. The remaining ones can either be frozen for future use, donated to other would-be parents, released for stem-cell research or, depending on the couple’s wishes, destroyed.

Source: nypost.com