A close friend once gave me a book about how to conceive a baby of the gender of your choice. I'm not entirely sure what the relevance of this gift was since both of us were going through our staunch I'm-not-having-children phase. I think it may have been triggered by a conversation in which we agreed that if we were ever going to have a child we'd prefer to have a girl. (Incidentally, twenty-odd years later we are both mothers. My girl arrived purely by chance while my friend's beautiful daughter arrived by way of an orphanage in Vietnam.)
From memory this book said that synchronising conception with a particular stage of the menstrual cycle could influence the child's gender - a theory that has apparently been refuted by numerous studies. But my abiding impression was of the careful language used and the way it stressed that this advice was intended for people who were aiming to "balance their family". This term refers to people who already have one or more of a particular gender and are keen to have one of the other variety.
Even today this is the way many organisations try to sanitise their offering. "Family balancing" is evidently a more palatable way of packaging gender preference. As the woman behind girlorboy4u.com which offers "natural gender selection" explains: "After giving birth to my second son, my husband and I were desirous that our next child would be a girl."
Blatantly preferring one gender over the other is clearly still not really acceptable in our society. Maybe that's a good thing since we only ever seem to hear shallow and sexist reasons for wanting a boy (someone to talk rugby with and take over the family business) or a girl (someone to dress prettily and go shopping with).
But these days, thanks to the wonders of science and technology, choosing the sex of your child is medically possible. There's no need to just try your best to conceive one gender over another. In conjunction with IVF, fertility specialists can now virtually guarantee whether your newborn is pink or blue.
