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 Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...