NSW clinic offers 'right' sex baby

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

New Zealanders desperate to have a baby of the "right" sex are travelling to Sydney for a treatment not available in New Zealand.

Sydney IVF is the only clinic in Australasia that can help couples to select the sex of their test-tube babies.

"We get a handful of patients a year from New Zealand," the clinic's medical director, Professor Robert Jansen, said yesterday.

About half of them wanted the sex-selection test - an add-on to in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) - so they could choose the sex. The rest wanted the test to check for inherited genetic disorders.

It was reported this week that a Belgian fertility clinic offers sex selection with IVF for $26,600.

The Catholic Church has denounced sex selection as pursuing "designer babies".

Three New Zealand clinics have ethical approval to develop techniques for the pre-implantation genetic diagnosis tests. These tests allow scientists to check the chromosomes, and sex, of embryos just days after fertilisation.

One of the clinics, Fertility Associates, plans to seek ethical approval this year to use the tests on patients, primarily to improve the pregnancy chances of women, especially those in their later childbearing years.

"We want to do it for people who have a real medical need," said the clinic's Dr Richard Fisher.

Fertility Associates does not have a formal position on sex selection, but Dr Fisher is cautiously in favour of it.

"There are circumstances under which I would be entirely happy with it, [like] family balancing."

Between 30 and 50 couples a year now go to Sydney IVF for the pre-implantation tests, including those for sex selection.

The service costs up to $4600, lifting the bill for one cycle of IVF to about $11,600.

Dr Fisher said Fertility Associates wanted to use the pre-implantation tests to increase the efficiency of IVF by being able to identify and exclude embryos that would never implant or would lead to miscarriage.

If the National Ethics Committee on Assisted Human Reproduction approves clinical use of the pre-implantation tests, it may have to stipulate that doctors not tell couples the sex of embryos - unless it approves sex selection.

Labour MP Dianne Yates' Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, now before the health select committee, would ban sex selection.

Father Michael McCabe, director of the New Zealand Catholic Bio-ethics Centre, said sex selection went against basic human rights. It undermined the dignity of the child and honouring children as a gift.

"It's treating the child as a commodity. What about blue eyes and blond hair as well?"

* Last year the ethics committee declined a bid for a woman to have a child using sperm that would have been donated by her stepson.

The committee, worried about analogies with incest, noted that if it had approved the application, "this could create what is seen as an 'unnatural situation'."