It's not about designer babies, this is about a decision for your family and
gender balancing your family. I'm 39 weeks pregnant so any day now I hope
this little girl arrives. I went to America and did gender selective IVF.
The flights, the accommodation for three weeks, so yeah it was quite an expensive trip.
There's a big shall we say demand rather need for it in
Australia and it would be rare for a fortnight to go by where I don't have a
couple seeking gender selection.
After I had my third boy I really wanted to have
a baby girl and I just thought if I was to have another child naturally there
was a high probability that it would be a boy.
So I just wanted to take that risk out of it.
Now that there's such accurate genetic testing available at 10 weeks we can
tell the gender of the fetus with less than a 1 in 10,000 error rate.
Patients are going ahead and unfortunately aborting healthy
children of the wrong gender.
Admission to life should not be conditional on the
child coming up to any expectations of the parents.
Just as we were very cognizant of it being a socially controversial issue, ten years
later another Australian health ethics committee was similarly aware of it
being a socially controversial issue but they too thought that the practice ought to be prohibited.
I would like the people to have an open mind about reviewing the
guidelines. If IVF is available, people get the PGS testing where embryos are
tested for chromosome abnormality so it's part of that process so it's not
anything additional, it's then just choosing the gender.
Well firstly where's the harm? You know there's just no harm associated with
doing gender selection for a set number of families who want a family balance.
There's no cost because the patient's have to wear it themselves so there's no
cost to the Medicare system or society. It's not going to affect the gender
balance at all and it's all about patient choice and a person's individual
bodies and the state doesn't need to intrude on that, that's a private matter
for patients, couples and families.
I've truly never believed particularly in the slippery slope argument.
There are lots of checks and safeguards in society about all sorts
of things and you know just because you allow something that's
reasonable doesn't mean that you automatically go to do something that's unreasonable.
This might be simply the foot-in-the-door. That once you permit
sex selection for non-medical reasons then you don't have grounds for
prohibiting it for a whole variety of reasons.
It's hard to say as a mum that
you want something that you don't have and that you're not grateful for what
you have because that's not the case. Like I love my boys and I wouldn't trade
my second boy for for a girl and I just feel like there's a gap missing.
There's experiences you get to have with boys and there's experiences you get to have
with girls and as a mother not being able to have a daughter, you miss out a
lot. You don't really have the opportunity to help them with their
wedding dress selection or you don't get to help them when they have their first
baby because they've got their own mum who's going to help them with that.
I went through a big depressive stage when I found out that I was having another
boy. For the whole entire pregnancy I was stuck inside, I really don't want to talk
to anyone. When people asked me, 'Oh you're pregnant do you know what you're having?'
I would just denied it. It's not just a, I want to have this and I would like to have
this, it's more like of a deeper emotion, that you feel like you need to
have it and that when you don't, you just get overwhelmed with emotion because
you feel like a part of you is just never going to be whole again.
I don't for a moment doubt their decency
and their desire for this, I don't for a moment and
I understand that maintaining the prohibition may cause distress and
inconvenience but parental love, love itself ought to be unconditional.
She's born eight pounds, two.
The boys are loving having their little sister around and
yeah I feel like our family's complete.
I don't really think about how we got her
anymore. It's just she was meant to be part of our family.
My husband and I talk all the time, that it's the best thing that we ever
did and we're so glad that we did it and were able to bring a girl into our family.
Whilst there's a demand for it, it would probably end up no more than a
couple of hundred IVF cycles across the whole of Australia per year and you know
don't forget, of course at the end of the day it's still going to be very
expensive for the patients. So yes it's going to be a little bit of extra
business for IVF but that's not the reason I support it, it's not a commercial
motive. I just don't think the state should be sticking its nose into
people's bedrooms.