IVF parents travel overseas to pick baby's sex

A leading IVF clinic is helping clients choose the sex of their baby by sending them to an overseas clinic it co-owns, avoiding Australian rules which allow the practice only for medical reasons.

Sydney IVF, which has several clinics in NSW as well as in Canberra, Perth and Tasmania, is part-owner of Superior ART, a Thai clinic that will provide IVF for ''family balancing'' - when families with children of one gender are seeking another child of the opposite sex.

It costs $11,000 including flights and accommodation, a spokesman for Sydney IVF said.

Australian fertility clinics are prohibited from offering sex selection for non-medical reasons by national ethical guidelines by which they must abide to be accredited.

But Sydney IVF maintains it is not doing anything wrong, arguing the rules banning the procedure are hurting Australian families.

The National Health and Medical Research Council's health ethics committee developed the guidelines. Its chairwoman, Sandra Hacker, said Australians generally believed parents should not be allowed to choose their child's gender to "balance" out their family.

"The right to life should not be determined by gender," she said. "There is a view that you should be happy with whatever gender you bring into the world, as long as they are well and happy".

However, it would breach people's rights to ban them from travelling overseas to have the procedure. If they did, she could understand Sydney IVF wanting to ensure they used a reputable provider. "But that doesn't make it any more ethical, it just makes it safer," she said.

The chief executive of Sydney IVF, Kylie de Boer, said that when the company had stopped offering sex selection in early 2005 families were left "devastated".

"These were people who loved children," she said. "They had a lot of children already and they wanted to have more."

She said the clinic still received about 15 phone calls a week from parents seeking the procedure, despite openly explaining on its website it was banned and the only option was to travel overseas.

Dr de Boer said when Sydney IVF had done the procedure clients were often mothers wanting a daughter.

"The desire for a mother-daughter relationship was very strong," she said.

She believed the decision was a highly personal one which should be made between doctors and patients.

"I think the guidelines are due for review and I think the guidelines are wrong,'' she said.

The medical director at Sydney IVF, Mark Bowman, said the sense of ''loss and grief'' felt by couples who could not conceive a child of the gender they desired was as strong as that felt by infertile couples.

The president of the Fertility Society of Australia, Peter Illingworth, did not have a problem with Sydney IVF providing sex selection overseas, so long as it complied with the rules of the country it operated in.

Public debate on whether the national guidelines were right and enforceable was needed.

"What is important is the community view about these matters, not necessarily the views of IVF specialists," he said.

The National Health and Medical Research Council said the guidelines would be reconsidered after a legislative review into the use of human embryos. That review, chaired by the former Federal Court judge Peter Heerey, is open for submissions.

Mum heads to Thailand in bid for daughter

A Melbourne woman is flying to Thailand to circumvent Australian guidelines which prevent families from determing the sex of of IVF babies.

The woman, known as Olivia, has three sons and says she has a strong desire to have a daughter.

"It's just something deep in me that I can't shake. I just feel this really strong wish to have a daughter to raise with my sons in a balanced family," she said.

"We conceived naturally for our three sons. This is not something we've taken on lightly."

Families are not allowed to choose the sex of a child through IVF in Australia under current guidelines and that is why she has to travel to Thailand for the procedure, which she estimates will cost about $15,000.

She says the treatment should be available in Australia.

"To me it's about providing choice but with parameters," she said.

"I don't think there is going to be a flood of women because this doesn't affect a lot of women."

Olivia says she is in touch with a number of other women who are also going overseas to obtain gender selection treatment.

Professor Loane Skene, from the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Health Ethics Committee, supports the plan.

She says Australians are allowed to travel to the United States to have a surrogate baby and does not see why Olivia and her family should be prevented from doing what they want to do.

However, Professor Skene does not think the law needs to be changed.

"I think many people are going to have sympathy for this sort of thing because it is such a strong human urge," she told ABC Radio's Jon Faine.

"It seems to me that the kerfuffle of going through IVF with all of the ups and downs and heartache of it all is not something that people are going to take on lightly quite apart from the cost."

Victorian Premier John Brumby has ruled out relaxing restrictions on access to IVF treatment in the state.

"There might be some particular cases where there is a medical case for saying that it's important to have a boy or a girl, but where it is non-medical, the Law Reform Commission and indeed the overwhelming body of advice on this suggests that it is not a requirement or a priority, in terms of changing policy," he said.