'Designer babies' are on the rise and more families want to make girls

What was once controversial in the U.S. and is banned in many countries across the globe is becoming trendy: choosing the gender of your baby through in vitro fertilization.

But it puts into question the ethics surrounding designer families, especially with an increasing number of couples opting for daughters over sons.

Emi Nietfeld, a freelance journalist who recently wrote about the topic for Slate Magazine , said sex selection has now become a standard part of IVF in America.

"It's pretty straightforward," Nietfeld told KCBS Radio. "If you are a woman, you will receive injections that you give yourself for a month to ripen your eggs in your ovaries. And then a quick surgery removes those eggs, and they will be combined with sperm in a Petri dish. After growing for a couple days into an embryo, they pull out a single cell. And from that cell, they can tell, does this have two X chromosomes or an X chromosome and a Y chromosome? And then couples or individuals can then select, okay, do we want to try for a girl or do we want to try for a boy?"

While some people use IVF because they have fertility issues, more and more couples who would otherwise have no trouble conceiving the old-fashioned way are turning to IVF specifically so they can select their baby's sex. It's hard to know just how many couples are purely opting for sex selection since no federal reporting is required. But doctors in the San Francisco Bay Area say it's an increasingly common practice.

"At a normal clinic that is not advertising sex selection, the estimate that I got was about 15% of their couples were coming in just for sex selection. At some clinics, that number is as high as 85%," said Nietfeld. "And at a few clinics, they don't offer this service at all, but that is becoming really increasingly rare."

While some couples may express some hesitation when it comes to the ethics behind choosing the sex of their baby, others have no problem exerting some degree of control over their baby's destiny.

"It also can feel like a lot of pressure on people," said Nietfeld. "When you're going in and you're saying, "I want to have a daughter," what happens if your daughter hates being a girl? Or if there ends up being expectations placed on her that she grows up to resent? That seems like a pretty big burden to me."

The process of IVF and sex selection is expensive and might take several tries before a couple is successful.

"There's a lot of averages estimating that this costs around $20,000 to $30,000 per attempt. When people are struggling with infertility, it often takes three or more attempts to create a baby," said Nietfeld. "And usually, this isn't covered by insurance."

Nietfeld noted in her report for Slate that nearly every country in the industrialized world -- including Canada, Australia, and every European country besides Cyprus -- bans sex selection except in rare medical cases, on the grounds that it promotes sexism and the possibility that children may be harmed by gendered expectations.

As for why the practice is still legal in the United States, Nietfeld said it goes back to the 1980s when IVF was still a fairly new technology.

"Other countries around the world were moving to regulate what you could and could not do with this technology. But in the United States, there was a lot of controversy, especially between anti-abortion conservatives and Democrats," she said. "And basically, the consensus ended up being, let's just let the private market figure this out. And we won't really have rules about it, we won't really have regulation, but also we won't have federal funding for it."