How Women Can Choose The Sex Of Their Child

A mother is a woman who nurtures a child through life, not necessarily a woman who gives birth biologically to a child. So a woman can adopt a child and raise the child as hers. Most women understand this, however, it is extremely painful to some women when they cannot give birth to a child. It can be a desperate situation for some mama-wannabes. In our neck of the woods,

a girl is expected to grow up into a woman, get married and have children. The script does not always play out as expected. Many women have been brutalized and sent packing out of their homes because they couldn't bear children or they have only girls. We have heard of baby factories in some parts of Nigeria where young, pregnant girls are kept and when they give birth, their babies are given to women looking for children in exchange for money. The male child attracts a higher amount of money. There have been stories of women carrying padded tummies. Is this morally, legally and ethically right? The woman who receives the baby then proclaims to the world that she has had a baby. Does she live with this lie and in this denial for the rest of her life?

Science is making this deep-rooted desire to have children come true for so many women who otherwise cannot have children. A young woman of 30 is under pressure to get married and start a family because her biological clock is ticking. This has resulted in a lot of girls getting married to the wrong man. Consequently, most of these marriages break up and that's probably why we are seeing a lot of divorces these days. We are also seeing a lot of single mothers now because some women will just rather have a baby than marry the wrong guy. Science has thrown up some options for women such as IVF (in vitro fertilization) but at a great cost which is unavailable to most women. A woman's eggs have a lifespan, women can now freeze their eggs or tissues from their ovaries, women are now able to have their first child in their forties, to mention a few celebrities such as Halle Berry, Mariah Carey, Marcia Cross and Nancy Grace. Science has made it possible for women to use egg donors and sperm donors. Women can now select the sex of their child through sperm selection.

Lastly, surrogacy is now being used by women. Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman carries and delivers a child for another couple or person. This woman, the surrogate mother, may be the child's genetic mother (called traditional surrogacy) or she may biologically unrelated to the child (called gestational surrogacy). This is mostly a commercial arrangement where a huge amount is paid to the surrogate. Celebrities like Sex in the City's Sarah Jessica Simpson have openly used surrogates. There is a high rate of international surrogacy activity in the U.S especially in places like Los Angeles, California and Boston, Massachusetts where wealthy foreigners go. Local Americans who cannot afford surrogacy in the U.S are going to countries like India where there is a huge "womb for rent" industry. A San Francisco, California woman recently wrote a book based on her experience using a surrogate mother in far away India. After going through three miscarriages, she learnt she could not carry a child. Her search for a solution took her to India where she met a woman willing to carry her and her husband's embryo.

After considerable soul-searching, she travelled to India in 2008 to Anand,a city in western India that has earned a reputation in recent years as the capital of India's so called "rent a womb" industry. The 36 year old marketing specialist met Vaina, the 26year-old married mother who would be her surrogate for less than half of what it would have cost her to use a surrogate in America. Is surrogacy an exploitation? She thinks a woman going through the risks of labor for another family clearly deserves to be paid. Her husband later joined her in India for the final stages of the IVF and today they have 2year-old twin daughters.

It was a win-win, allowing the surrogate mother to have a brighter future and herself and her husband to have children. If her money was going to benefit an Indian woman financially for a service she willingly provided, she preferred that it be a poor woman who really needed help because the money that a surrogate mother earns in India is life-changing.

Culled from Life & StyleSavvy with Susan Ikhine Column, City People Magazine.