Your sample size of three is statistically meaningless.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Girls make for stronger fetuses.

this

yep, and this is especially relevant with IVF when parents tend to be older and tend to generally have more challenges with carrying babies to term in addition to fertility.

I know that at the clinic we visited, you needed to have a valid medical reason to sex select. Some genetic diseases Target one sex or the other. Some mutation carriers have fewer effects depending on sex. I’m not explaining this well, but think of BRCA mutation carriers.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you really choose gender in IVF?

Yes! And people often have a preference for girls. Given many IVF parents are older, girls are less likely to have autism.

Most people just go with the best looking embryos. Once you get to the point of IVF, you aren’t choosy about the sex.

This.
We just wanted a baby. We didn’t care about sex. Most others at know that struggled with infertility for years were the same.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you really choose gender in IVF?

Yes! And people often have a preference for girls. Given many IVF parents are older, girls are less likely to have autism.

Most people just go with the best looking embryos. Once you get to the point of IVF, you aren’t choosy about the sex.

I did IVF and I have a boy.

Anonymous wrote:Can you really choose gender in IVF?

Yes! And people often have a preference for girls. Given many IVF parents are older, girls are less likely to have autism.

Skinny on PGS:

PGS testing is an optional, additional process and expense once you have embryos created via IVF. A small sample is removed from each embryo and sent for testing. The turnaround time is typically 2 to 4 weeks at most clinics with good arrangements with labs. It costs about $5,000-$7,000 and there is a (low) risk of damage to the embryos during the sample extraction process.

The testing screens for genetic abnormalities to help determine which embryos have better odds of resulting in pregnancy and live birth. Embryos are then generally graded as normal, abnormal, or mosaic, which means it’s possible there is an issue that can or cannot be self corrected if pregnancy occurred and as the fetus grows or is simply too close a margin to determine whether there’s a genetic issue or not. Some doctors will knowingly implant mosaic embryos (of course with consent), others will not. Just depends on the clinic and doctor. Sometimes, all the embryos are perfectly genetically normal, other times none of them are. The vast majority will have some normal and some abnormal.

Determining sex is part of what the PGS testing accomplishes. Couples or individuals can then decide if they want to select an embryo of a particular sex to implant or not. Many request that the strongest, best looking embryo be implanted, regardless of sex. Some don’t want to know how many male or female embryos there are, others specifically want to use only one sacks of embryos.

PGS testing has become very common in the United States but is still illegal in many European countries and other parts of the world, unless the parents to be have documented genetic disorder(s) they are both carriers for that would need to be screened out.

I’m in a few infertility support groups - the most recent IVF babies I know are 7 boys and 3 girls. One chose a boy, but I’m pretty confident the rest were chance.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Girls make for stronger fetuses.

this

Yep. My SIL had IVF and only 2 embryos survived, both girls. I think, somehow, it's also regional; we moved south and there are an insane amount of girls here. Families with 2, 3, 4 girls only or 1 boy and 2-3 girls. My DS1's class is 80% girls and my DS2 was the only boy in his preschool class. Our old neighbor in NoVA was mostly boys.

I’ve heard that day 5 embryos are more likely to be boys and day 6 embryos are more likely to be girls. But who knows. All the studies I’ve heard about have said boys are more common with IVF (leaving gender selection aside - I chose to transfer a female embryo first but don’t advertise that fact).

Anonymous wrote:Girls make for stronger fetuses.

this

I had one egg retrieval, which resulted in 3 viable embryos. We did PGS. All three were female. Only one resulted in a successful pregnancy - our first DD.
I had a surprise natural conception several years later - also a girl!

I was in an IVF support group back then, and it seemed to be a pretty even split with successful pregnancies.

How can you chose your embryos? How do you know if it is a male or a female? Do you have to pay extra? I thought you already determined the information since you have to go through all of the testing. Why the extra cost?

My first IVF was a boy, second IVF is now a girl. IVF doesn't make one more likely than the other to happen unless you gender select. I think depending on the procedure (whether it was ICSI or not), there might be a slight chance of having one instead of the other, but not a big difference at all. (It's been a long time since I've looked at that though.)

Girls tend to be preferred in this area, and so it's possible that some of your friends *might* have chosen to have a girl. Particularly for this area, since so many mothers tend to be on the older side, genetic testing might be more likely to be recommended. And if someone is already planning to do genetic testing, they may be more likely to choose the sex.

But as someone else said, a few people does not really make it a trend or statistically significant.