What Is Family Balancing With IVF?

What does family balancing with IVF mean?

Connecticut IVF patients sometimes ask our Park Avenue Fertility and Reproductive Medicine team, “It’s possible to just create a boy or girl, right?” Nope, there is no secret sauce for creating a boy or a girl, so we must defer to old-fashioned biology. However, thanks to advances in genetic testing, we have increased the odds of transferring a chromosomally normal embryo, with the added benefit of identifying biological sex. This provides a pathway to achieve family balancing with IVF through sex selection.

The ABCs of X and Y chromosomes and sex selection

While your high school biology lessons might be long ago forgotten, they come front and center in reproduction, especially for Connecticut IVF patients. In humans, a normal cell chromosome count is 46, which includes 23 chromosomes from the mother and 23 from the father. The 23^rd pair determines the sex of a baby. A female has a pair of X chromosomes (XX), and a male has an X and Y chromosome (XY).

And while it takes two to tango to grow a family, the sperm is the difference maker in a baby’s sex. The egg will always have an X chromosome, and the sperm can give X or Y. So, creating a boy or girl with IVF simply isn’t possible because no one can preselect which chromosome is carried in the sperm.

However, family balancing with IVF using sex selection is a different story. Preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A) enables Connecticut IVF patients to select an embryo with a normal chromosome count for transfer, increasing the odds of a successful pregnancy. In addition, this test also reliably reveals the sex of each embryo, which is valuable for several reasons.

Concerns about passing on a sex-linked genetic disease
A priority on family balancing with IVF
Other personal preferences

We educate patients about family balancing with IVF

We encourage our Connecticut IVF patients to ask questions of our fertility expert, Dr. Andrew Levi. Importantly, this empowers them to make informed decisions in fertility treatment. Our Park Avenue Fertility physician provides accurate information and debunks myths. For patients interested in genetic testing and its connection to sex selection, Dr. Andrew Levi MD will thoroughly answer questions about PGT-A.

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