Brits use NYC clinic to choose children’s gender

NEW YORK — A New York City clinic is providing sex-selection services to British couples who want to “balance” their families — a practice that is outlawed in their home country.

The couples spend up to nearly the equivalent of $50,000 per trip to New York City in an effort to guarantee they have the child of the sex they desire, according to the Telegraph. Most of the clinic’s clients have two or more children of the same sex but want a child of the opposite sex, said Jeffrey Steinberg, director of Fertility Institutes in Manhattan. The British government banned sex selection for “social or ‘family balancing’” reasons in 2009, the Telegraph reported. No such prohibition exists in the United States. 

The female British clients begin their treatments in London clinics by taking drugs to stimulate egg production before traveling to New York City to complete the process, the Telegraph reported. After fertilization in the clinic, the embryos undergo pre-implantation diagnosis to determine their health and sex before the chosen ones are implanted.

British clients are “fairly evenly split, perhaps slightly [favoring] girls,” Steinberg told the Telegraph, while clients from China and India choose boys at a rate of 98 and 97 percent, respectively.