More than 2 out of 5 infertile women would use technology that enables them to choose the sex of their unborn babies if it were freely available, a survey shows.

Nearly one-half of women who wanted to use sex-selection technology did not have any children, a somewhat surprising finding, study author Dr. Tarun Jain told AMN Health.

Jain explained that experts have suspected that most people want to use sex-selection technology in order to balance their families - if they have 3 boys for instance, they want to make sure the next child is a girl.

These findings suggest that for many people, choosing the sex of their baby has nothing to do with “family balancing,” Jain noted. “I hope our findings stimulate further discussions among policy makers and ethicists as to the appropriate use of this technology,” the University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago, researcher said.

Interestingly, infertile women with no children preferred boys and girls in equal numbers, Jain noted. It’s possible that women struggling to get pregnant may want to choose the sex of their baby to make sure they get what they want, the researcher said. “They may be thinking that they may only have one chance to have a child, and thus want it to be either a boy or girl.”

There are currently two techniques women can use to choose the sex of their unborn children, Jain and colleagues write in the journal Fertility and Sterility. As part of sperm separation, doctors divide sperm that carry female genetic material from sperm that carry male genetic material. This technique is between 60 and 90 percent successful, Jain said.

Alternatively, some couples use preimplantation genetic diagnosis, in which doctors test an early embryo to see if it’s male or female before implanting it into the woman’s uterus, which is nearly 100 percent accurate, Jain noted.

Both treatments cost between $2,000 and $3,000. The techniques were designed to help people work around a family history of disease-causing genes that occur only in boys or girls, but are now increasingly used for non-medical purposes.

That has raised some concerns, and some experts - including the President’s Council on Bioethics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists - have argued that it’s unethical to use sex-selection technology for non-medical purposes. And in the UK, it’s illegal to choose the sex of a baby without any medical reason for doing so.

To investigate how infertile women feel, Jain and colleagues interviewed 1500 about the technology. Women indicated if they would use the techniques if they were free, and if so, which gender they would prefer.

Nearly 41 percent of infertile women said they would choose the sex of their baby. Although childless women with no children preferred boys or girls equally, women were more likely to want a girl if they were older, not religious, willing to pay for sex-selection procedures, and had only sons.

“The traditional fear with sex selection has always been that it will result in a greater preference for boys versus girls,” Jain said. “Our study actually suggests that, at least in the infertile population, this may not be the case.”

SOURCE: Fertility and Sterility, March 2005.