Rich foreigners coming to US for sex selection

They are spending up to £30,000 a time on trips to New York, to guarantee a boy or a girl, according to a clinic.

Clients include senior British politicians, claims Dr Jeffrey Steinberg, the Cambridge-trained IVF specialist who heads the Fertility Institutes clinic in Manhattan....

However, sex selection for social or ‘family balancing’ reasons was made illegal in the UK in October 2009, after the government amended the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990.

Under the legislation, sex selection is only allowed for medical reasons, such as to avoid the risk of a child being born with a sex-linked genetic disorder like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which only presents in boys. Similar laws exist in many other countries.

No such stipulations exist in many US states, with IVF clinics there seeking to capitalise on a growing desire among wealthy couples from around the world to design their families rather than leaving it to chance. Speaking to the Evening Standard, Dr Steinberg, who trained alongside IVF pioneer Robert Edwards at the Bourne Hall Clinic, which is linked to Cambridge University, said 15 per cent of clients at the New York centre were British....

[Steinberg] admitted clients from some countries were almost exclusively interested in boys. Demand from China - currently under pressure to revoke its controversial one child policy - was 98 per cent for boys, he said, while from India it was 97 per cent.