Family Balancing

What is Family Balancing?

Many parents feel a strong desire to complete their families with the addition of a son or a daughter. Family balancing provides couples having at least one child the opportunity to use a number of different techniques to increase the chance of having another child of the less represented gender in the family.

The International Federation of Gynecologists and Obstetricians (FIGO) Committee for the Ethical Aspects of Human Reproduction and Women’s Health stated in 1994 that “pre-conception sex selection can be justified on social grounds in certain cases for the objective of allowing children of the two sexes to enjoy the love and care of parents.”

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) Ethics Committee published in 2001 an Ethics Committee Report concerning the use of preconception gender selection for non-medical reasons. The Ethics Committee recognized that “parents have traditionally had great discretion in their procreative decisions and that sex selection might provide perceived individual and social goods such as gender balance or distribution in a family with more than one child, parental companionship with a child of one’s own gender, and a preferred gender order among one’s children.”

The ASRM Committee further recommended that “the most prudent approach at present for the non-medical use of these techniques would be to use them only for gender variety in a family, i.e., only to have a child of the gender opposite of an existing child or children. If the social, psychological, and demographic effects of those uses of preconception gender selection have been found acceptable, then other non-medical uses of preconception selection might be considered.”

Family Fertility Center offers family balancing by Preimplantation Genetic Screening (PGS), a form of prenatal diagnosis performed on early embryos prior to implantation in the uterus and initiation of pregnancy. Only embryos of the desired gender are returned to the uterus, which provides a nearly 100% accuracy rate if pregnancy is achieved. For more information on gender selection for Family Balancing at the Family Fertility Center, please call (610) 868-8600 to schedule a consultation.