Gender Selection

Daniel Rostein, MD, FACOG

Fertility Specialist & Fertility Clinic located in Oak Brook, IL

You don’t need to wait until the second trimester to learn if your baby is a boy or a girl. Instead, you can use gender selection performed by infertility expert Daniel Rostein, MD, FACOG, in Oak Brook, Illinois, to choose your baby’s sex from the start. Whether you have medical or personal reasons to use gender selection, you can depend on Dr. Rostein to guide you along every step of the process. Call the office today or request an appointment online to learn more about gender selection.

812-594-9343

Gender Selection Q & A

What is gender selection?

Gender selection allows parents to choose their baby’s biological sex. If you want to use gender selection, you’ll undergo in vitro fertilization (IVF), which means the eggs and sperm are fertilized in a lab.

IVF allows Dr. Rostein to run genetic testing on the embryos in the lab, a procedure called preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). PGT identifies the gender and can also test for some inherited conditions if desired.

When should I consider gender selection?

You might decide to choose your baby’s gender if you or your partner have an inherited disorder that’s passed to a specific sex and you want to reduce the risk of having a baby with that disorder.

Two examples of sex-linked genetic diseases are muscular dystrophy (progressive muscle weakness) and hemophilia (a bleeding disorder). Both diseases primarily affect boys. Muscular dystrophy rarely occurs in girls. Girls also have a very low risk of inheriting hemophilia.

However, gender selection is often a personal choice. You might want your first or possibly your only child to be a boy or a girl. Or you already have several children of the same gender and want your next child to be the opposite gender.

What happens during gender selection?

The IVF process begins with taking fertility drugs to stimulate the production of many eggs. Most women take the medications for about two weeks. During that time, Dr. Rostein regularly monitors your progress to determine when the eggs have matured.

He removes the mature eggs from your ovaries using ultrasound imaging to guide a needle through the vagina and into the ovaries. Light suction safely pulls the eggs into the hollow needle. If you’re not using previously frozen sperm, sperm collection is timed to coincide with egg removal.

The eggs and sperm immediately go to the lab. Dr. Rostein can place them together and let fertilization occur naturally. Or he could inject sperm directly into the egg, a procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).

After five days, Dr. Rostein removes a few cells from the fertilized embryos and runs PGT testing. For the final step, he performs a blastocyst transfer, implanting the healthiest embryo with your chosen gender into your uterus.

Call Daniel Rostein, MD, or connect online to request an appointment to learn more about gender selection.

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