Learn how family balancing can help you have your dream family

Fertility treatments are amazing. They can help overcome many causes of female and male infertility. Not only that, but they can also allow you to select the sex of your baby through family balancing, or gender selection.  At Texas Fertility Center, we offer this advanced fertility option to patients who want to have a boy or a girl baby. Our Austin fertility center team is here to explain how this fertility treatment can help you welcome a baby of a specific sex.

How does gender selection work?

If you would like to pursue family balancing at our Austin fertility center, this will involve undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A). This multi-step process is a highly effective way to start or grow your family, while also learning about the genetic health and sex of your embryos.

First, you’ll take medications to stimulate the growth of multiple eggs during the process of ovarian stimulation. While taking these medications, you’ll attend regular monitoring appointments at our clinic.

When your eggs are mature, you’ll receive an ovulation trigger shot. Then, you’ll come to our fertility center for an outpatient egg retrieval procedure. You’ll receive light sedation to keep you comfortable, and you can return home the same day.

After retrieving your eggs, we will send them to our IVF laboratory for fertilization. This process involves combining the eggs with sperm from your partner or your chosen sperm donor using traditional fertilization or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).

Once the resulting embryos are a few days old, one of our embryologists will take a small biopsy of each embryo. This involves removing a few cells from the part of the embryo that will become the placenta, which makes this a safe procedure.

The embryo biopsies will undergo analysis using PGT-A. This specialized form of testing will not only let you know which embryos are male and which are female, but it will also provide information about whether each embryo is genetically normal (euploid) or abnormal (aneuploid).

After receiving the results, your doctor will review them with you before transferring a euploid embryo of the sex you prefer.

Who might want to pursue family balancing?

Patients visit our Austin fertility center to pursue gender selection for two primary reasons. The first reason is obvious. Sometimes, a family has multiple children of the same gender and wants to have a baby of the opposite sex. For example, if a couple has several sons, they might decide to transfer a female embryo during their next cycle.

The less-obvious reason relates to certain inheritable genetic conditions. Sometimes, a patient carries or has a sex-linked genetic condition that they could pass to their children. By utilizing gender selection, it can minimize the risk of transmitting this illness by only transferring embryos of a certain sex.

No matter why you decide to pursue family balancing, our team will support you and develop a customized treatment plan to meet your needs and goals.

Contact us to schedule an appointment and learn more about gender selection. We look forward to helping you on your path to parenthood.