It may soon be possible for Australian couples to choose the sex of their child for cultural reasons or to balance out the gender ratio in their family. Regulations on sex selection technology are being reviewed by the nation’s health watchdog, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), with many doctors pushing for the contentious issue to become more readily available.

Professor Gab Kovacs, pioneer of the IVF industry, believes that since the procedure is so expensive (with treatments costing between A$10,000 and $15,000), only the most determined will seek it.

“If I am prepared to pay for it out of my own pocket I can’t understand why that should be forbidden,” he told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph last week.

“It might even be in the best interests of the child. If a couple so badly want a boy or a girl that they are prepared to go through IVF and gender selection then maybe, if they had the child naturally and it was the wrong gender it may not be looked after as well.”

The use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is currently only permitted for medical reasons, where parents carry serious genetic diseases and defects that are only inheritable by children of one gender. However, the five-year moratorium placed on the widespread use of sex selection is set to expire this year. Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon does not support the idea. She told the ABC: “the [state and federal] governments had not set down the path because we want to make any changes, and at a personal level I'm very uncomfortable about the suggestions that a change might be made." However the Australian IVF industry is a formidable lobbyist and could get its way. ~ Daily Telegraph, Mar 13; ABC, Mar 13