Australian parents travel to Thailand to choose baby’s sex

Australian IVF clinic, Sydney IVF, is helping clients choose the sex of their baby by sending them to a Thai clinic it co-owns, avoiding Australian rules which allow the practice only for medical reasons. Sydney IVF has several clinics in NSW, Canberra, Perth and Tasmania. It is also part owner of Superior ART, a Thai clinic that provides IVF for family balancing, when families with children of one gender are seeking another child of the opposite sex. It costs $11,000 including flights and accommodation,

Australian fertility clinics are prohibited from offering sex selection for non-medical reasons by national ethical guidelines by which they must abide to be accredited. The National Health and Medical Research Council’s health ethics committee developed the guidelines as argues that Australians generally believe parents should not be allowed to choose their child’s gender to balance out their family. Sydney IVF maintains it is not in breach of the guidelines, as it would breach people’s rights to ban them from travelling overseas to have the procedure. It also argues, with support from the Fertility Society of Australia, that sex selection overseas is within the rules of Thailand and Australia has no right to interfere in the laws of another country. One in six Australian couples suffer from infertility problems.