Your Choice: Boy or Girl?
By Jeannette Moninger,
Parents
| 06. 30. 2006
Jennifer Merrill Thompson was confident the baby she was carrying -- her second -- was a girl. After all, the mom from Vienna, Virginia, had followed the suggestions in the book How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby, which detailed how to optimally time intercourse in order to conceive a girl. So when the sonogram image left no doubt that her daughter was, in fact, another son, a shocked Thompson burst into tears. "I didn't want to be just a mother of boys," she explains.
Although Thompson says she immediately fell in love with her son, she still felt a void that could only be filled by little frilly dresses. Thompson became a mom on a mission, scouring the Internet for a way to guarantee that baby number three would be her dream daughter.
Her quest landed her at the Genetics & IVF Institute, in Fairfax, Virginia, where a clinical trial is currently under way to test the safety and efficacy of a sperm-sorting process called MicroSort. After three rounds of artificial insemination, Thompson finally conceived her little girl...
Related Articles
By Jennifer Denbow, Guest Contributor
| 10.29.2026
Almost every day I am reminded that we are in the midst of a fertility panic. Whether it’s the Vice President exhorting Americans to have more babies or The New York Times running yet another story about the fertility cliff, fear about falling fertility rates is everywhere. While centrally concerned with declining rates of childbearing, Anna Louie Sussman’s new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, is a welcome antidote to the panic.
Sussman has written...
By Anna Louie Sussman, The New Republic | 10.26.2026
There’s a certain kind of novel that’s not quite apocalyptic enough to be science fiction, but just far-fetched enough to be speculative. No one is from outer space; society has not yet been carved up into a hierarchy of groups...
By Jan Grue, The Guardian | 10.27.2026
For a very long time, I dreamed of being cured. I was born in 1981. I learned to walk early enough, but I stumbled and fell more easily than other children. My parents began to worry that something was wrong...
By staff, We Are Egg Donors | 10.21.2026
Michelle Lambrechts is a police officer and one-time egg donor in Belgium. She is also the founder of Ik Zit Met Een Ei, a Belgian nonprofit that advocates for egg donors. (The name is a Dutch play on words...
