Demographic IVF

The birth of David and Victoria Beckham’s fourth child filled many column inches. Some of those inches pursued the rumour that the Beckhams’ may have sought medical influence to ensure a daughter, following on from three sons.

Irrespective of whether the couple made the ultimate in celebrity lifestyle choices, it is far from a new science. Sex selection became a possibility following the first occurrence of successful in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in 1978. Since then voices promoting a parents’ right to choose their offspring’s sex – though at a price – are getting louder.

In the UK, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority prohibits the sexing of embryos. However, institutes across the US and the Middle East will offer the procedure for prices of around £15,000, advertising between 75 and 100 percent success rates in ensuring a child’s sex.

Though very much a luxury, the implications upon demographic make up, particularly for cultures that place significant importance on gender roles, are worrying. By 2005 in China, the combination of the one child policy and a male-dominated society had seen the ratio of males to females born – reportedly around 105:100 worldwide – shift to about 120:100. Studies now expect that there will be 32 million more men of marrying age than women in China by 2020.

Of course, China’s size will often make any set of statistics appear extreme. However, its birth ratios are far from unique. Both India and South Korea place greater value on males than females. Ratios of males to females in both countries have likewise been skewed to similar levels as China. Some rural regions of India are reported to have reached as far above the average as 130:100 males to females according to protest groups.

Without the scientific methods for sex selection, the implications of such figures are horrific. This was reflected in June when uproar occurred in India over a report from the Hindustan Times that parents were paying the equivalent of £2,000 for genitoplasty surgery to change the sex of baby females to males. Though doubt has been cast on the veracity of the story, the underlying attitudes it indicates are nonetheless a reality. Make scientific sex selection widely available in such an environment and the results for population balance could be disastrous.

Research into a variety of IVF methods has shown that several techniques predicate male births over female. Research from the University of New South Wales in 2010 showed that one of the greatest bias producing forms of IVF shifted the ratio of males to females born to 112:100, while another decreased the number of females born to the equivalent of 97.

With IVF accounting for less than four million births worldwide and scientific sex selection reasonably rare and controversial, significant unnatural demographic imbalance as a result of the methodology remains a far off occurrence. Given the other forces at play and the birth ratios around the globe however, this is fast becoming a man’s world.