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A more contentious segment of the market revolves around sex selection. Technically, choosing the sex of one’s baby is no longer particularly complicated. Embryologists can determine an embryo’s gender while it is still in vitro. Ultrasound technicians can tell as early as twelve weeks after conception. And a new crop of screening techniques promises to differentiate male from female sperm. [86] All these techniques have created the quiet possibility of commercial sex selection.

In Virginia, the Genetics & IVF Institute began to offer “sperm sorting” on an experimental basis in 1998, using a patented technology called MicroSort to select those sperm most likely to produce either a girl or a boy. Originally, this high-tech method of staining and then separating sperm was developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who were working on ways of fine-tuning the breeding process of cattle and other livestock. But doctors at the Genetics & IVF Institute seized upon the obvious commercial applications in humans and negotiated an exclusive license for all human uses of MicroSort. Because the technology in this case was subject to review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Institute could not leap as quickly into the sex selection market as it had elsewhere. So it launched well-publicized trials instead, asking potential clients through radio and magazine ads, “Do you want to choose the gender of your next baby?” By early 2004, more than four hundred presorted babies had been born this way, each at a cost of roughly $2,500. [87]

Meanwhile, developments along the cutting edge of infertility treatment promise to create both new modes of conception and expanded nodes of commerce. In 1992, for example, researchers in Belgium pioneered the technique known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (the abbreviation, ICSI, is pronounced “icksy”). Using tiny needles and micromanipulators (tools that lessen the hand’s movement), the scientists were able to isolate a single sperm and inject it directly into the egg. The egg was fertilized, and a child was born. Subsequent experiments demonstrated that ICSI was extremely successful in dealing with male-related infertility, and, as word of the technique spread, other fertility centers began to attempt it. Most achieved the same kind of success that the Belgians had predicted, with overall pregnancy rates of about 32 percent. [88]