Top IVF doctor defends offering help for parents to pick babies' sex

MEET the doctor who is making Scots' dreams of designing the perfect baby come true.


Dr Jeffrey Steinberg reveals five couples from Scotland have travelled to his US clinics in the past year to have a £13,000 procedure which allows them to choose the sex of their child.

Sex selection in countries such as Scotland is banned unless there's a medical reason, which provides Dr Steinberg's clinics in New York and Los Angeles with brisk business from abroad.

Now couples who suffer from gender disappointment are taking out loans and even remortgaging their homes to use in-vitro fertilisation to balance their families and get the girl or boy of their dreams.

And Dr Steinberg, who is a pioneer of the screening process - preimplantation genetic diagnosis - claims this is just the start of it.

He's sparked controversy by saying that couples will soon be able to choose everything about their baby, including the colour of their eyes and hair. Dr Steinberg said: "We don't look at designer babies the same way as designer outfits.

"We're not playing God. What we're doing is studying God's work, studying his creations and learning from it. We don't make boys or girls, the couples do that."

Dr Steinberg's Fertility Institutes are the world's largest sex selection programme and staff take care of everything for couples who sign up.

Payment plans, a travel agent, a list of restaurants and hotels and even a babysitting service can be provided.

The expert helps around 100 Brits a year select the sex of their baby and 70 per cent of the patients he treats are from outside the US.

He gets about equal requests for boys and girls from couples in the UK but elsewhere the picture is different.

Dr Steinberg said: "Asian countries clearly favour males. Canada has a bias towards females while the Brits are 50/50. We can usually tell what sex they want before they tell us.

"If the female makes the appointment they almost always want a girl and if the male makes the appointment they almost always want a boy."

Pgd - which involves taking sperm and eggs from a couple, creating embryos in the lab, examining them for genetic health and their gender before selecting the best to be implanted - was originally developed to help families with a history of devastating diseases.

It is only legal in Scotland for couples where sex selection can prevent a child being born with a crippling disease.

Dr Steinberg says the benefits to medicine of examining embryos in the lab has led to an explosion of discovery in the past few decades.

When research started, scientists only had the technology to test three chromosomes and identify two genetic disorders. Today his team of laboratory experts can check all 46 chromosomes in an embryo and eliminate more than 400 diseases.

The success rates are startling. At Dr Steinberg's Fertility Institutes the average age of women who are treated is 37 and 75 per cent go on to get pregnant with a baby of the sex they selected.

Californians Dionne and Joe Smiegel had two girls when they enlisted his help to have boy twins.

But the process can take a heavy financial toll.

Dr Steinberg said: "Sometimes the family call and say they're 80 per cent of the way there with the money but the wife is getting older and they fear they're running out of time. We say fine, just come. We do an occasional free case too. Some people are concerned about costs. Others come out and end up staying in the finest hotels in Beverly Hills."

Last year, Dr Steinberg's clinics caused a storm after promising they would soon give patients the chance to select eye and hair colour, too.

Plans were put on ice after the clinic received a letter from the Vatican. Dr Steinberg insists it was only early days research.

He said: "We were criticised for even thinking about it. The original intention was to help children with albinism who have no eye pigment.

"In the Scandinavians we were able to isolate eye colour genes. They are a very homogeneous population. They've been isolated for decades. Their gene pool is very pure.

"Once we isolate the gene pool and start adding in Asian people or Latin American people then it becomes more difficult to determine. The Vatican were very nice but were asking us to think about what we were doing. It's on the backburner for now but it will be here in future."

Despite this Dr Steinberg, who is a proud dad to two girls and a boy which, he explains, were conceived "the old fashioned way", is baffled by the British ban on sex selection.

He started training to become a doctor in Cambridge and feels saddened that Britain's scientific trailblazers had to take a step back.

He said: "They were at the forefront of in vitro technology. They've fallen so far behind but from the political end."

But he believes there's no point in blocking change. What sparks fear today may seem normal tomorrow.

Dr Steinberg thinks back to the start of his career.

He said: "Somebody left a note on my car saying, 'Test tube babies have no souls'. It was new. People were intimidated. Now, 30 years later, I go to a party and half the kids are IVF.

"This is another footstep along that path."



Going abroad to get your choice of a boy or a girl baby starts with a phone call or an email inquiry to Dr Steinberg's Fertility Institutes.

After initial medical tests at a partner fertility clinic in Scotland, the woman's monthly cycle is analysed and drugs given to stimulate her ovaries so she produces the maximum number of eggs.

The treatment lasts for three weeks, two of which are at home. When she starts her period she contacts the US clinic to fix up a date to travel.

Dr Steinberg said: "We fly them in and the day after they get in we are ready to extract the eggs.

"The eggs come out, we get sperm from the partner, inseminate the eggs and get the embryos."

It takes five nerve-wracking days before the embryos can be screened for gender and genetic abnormalities. The average number of eggs created is 12 and the average healthy number of embryos is eight.

Dr Steinberg said: "Couples are on the edge of their seat. They usually spend those five days visiting New York or LA.

"On the fifth day they come back in, we show them the digital pictures of the embryos and make a decision about what we're going to give them back. We like to put back two if we can."

In 94 per cent of cases there is at least one healthy embryo which is the gender of the couple's choice but for the other six per cent of patients the embryos are all one gender.

Dr Steinberg said: "That's a heart breaker but we always warn couples this can happen.

"Most repeat the process and the second time they get what they want."

Three out of four of his patients get pregnant on their first attempt and, thanks to the technique, more than 2000 babies have been conceived at his clinic so far.

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