We all know of couples who had six daughters before they got the longed-for son, and we've met the about-to-conceive couples intent on the designer family, whether it's a girl first and a boy second or vice versa. It may be PC to say that a baby's sex is irrelevant, but for every pregnant mother who says: "I don't mind what it is as long as it's healthy", there is another who is silently praying for one sex or the other.
Now a British company is promising parents that they can choose the gender of their baby with 98 per cent certainty simply by having sexual intercourse on particular days of the year. Right Baby, which is being launched in London today and in Dublin in two weeks' time, is perfect for consumers who see babies not merely as acts of creation, but as expensive acquisitions to boot. The company's very name presumes that there is a Wrong Baby, which some might regard as a morally questionable concept.
"Having the right baby means that both mother and father will be happier and as a result, there will be no little girls who feel that their parents wished that they were boys!" says the Right Baby press pack. "Also if the mother has two boys she may be keen to have another baby if she could be sure that it would be a girl!"
Right Baby uses the Selnas Method, based on a claim by Russian scientists that each sperm contains a gender-identifying chromosome which is drawn by a positive or negative charge. According to French research since then, it is the ovum (egg) itself which through its own negative or positive charge selects the sperm with the y (boy) or x (girl) chromosome and rejects the other. The charge varies from positive to negative depending on the woman's "natural cycle", so that the ovum alternates between selecting boy sperm and girl sperm.
A French scientist, Patrick Schoun, has invented a software programme which predicts this cycle based on no more than the date of the start of a woman's last period. Right Baby uses this to provide a woman with a personalised, 12month calendar which indicates the 70 to 80 days during the year when she should have sexual intercourse in order to conceive the gender she desires. The cost is £199 sterling and most parents conceive within six months - but if they do not conceive within 12 months, another calendar is issued free.
Right Baby is claiming an impressive 98.7 per cent success rate based on a six-year study of 155 French couples, 52 per cent of whom wanted girls.
Should Irish parents in search of the designer family rush to buy Right Baby's service? "My advice would be to wait until further studies are done," says Dr Peter Boylan, Master of the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street in Dublin. Such an amazing medical breakthrough, if it is one, must be checked and crosschecked by other scientific institutions and published by reputable journals before it can be universally recognised. Dr Boylan advises: "There is no harm in wanting a boy or a girl, as long as you realise that whatever sex the child, he or she will be deserving of your love."
