Genetic Sorting Lets Parents Stack Odds Of Baby’S Gender

Given the choice, few want to fool with Mother Nature when it comes to choosing a baby’s gender, New Yorkers say.

A new sex-selection technique that rigs the odds is drawing mixed reviews from parents and doctors.

“It certainly wouldn’t be the way I’d want to plan my family,” said Pat Manchisi of Pleasantville, N.Y., a high school teacher and mother of four boys and a girl.

Tim O’Leary, a retired police officer in Westchester, N.Y., and father of four girls, liked the idea.

“I wanted a boy. That’s why we had four,” O’Leary said. “I don’t think a selection like that would be unnatural. I think it would be the thing to do.”

The new technique, MicroSort, was developed at the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Va., where doctors found that sperm cells carrying the X chromosome that makes girls are weighted with more DNA than the boy-creating Y chromosomes.

To separate X sperm cells from Y sperm cells, doctors wash them in fluorescent dye that bonds to DNA, then run the cells through a gauntlet - one at a time, a lineup that can take all day for the 200 million cells in a typical sample - where a laser beam light shows which are bigger.

Women then are artificially inseminated with the sperm of choice. The cost is about $2,500.

Nature’s methods give parents a 50-50 chance of having a boy or a girl. With sperm sorting, rates jump to 93 percent for those wanting girls, and about the same for boys, according to a recent study by Dr. Edward Fugger in the journal Human Reproduction.

In the study, scientists reported that of 14 pregnancies designed to produce girls, 13 did so. They expect similar success with those meant to produce boys. But other doctors are unsure of the process and long-term effects.

Even mothers who passionately wanted a child of a certain gender had doubts.

“I wanted a boy the entire time,” said Galina Brouwer, 51, mother of three daughters and a long-time New Yorker who now lives in Florida and Bali, Indonesia.

But, Brouwer said, “I wouldn’t do any ‘Brave New World’ thing - not when it comes to having a child.”