Eeenie, Meenie, Miny, Mo

I know this is an old topic that has been debated in the press, but I recently thought about it b/c people have asked me: If you have another child, what would you like to have?

What do you think about this:

A new clinical trial in the United States allows couples to pick the sex of their unborn children in an effort to determine the social effects.
The doctors create embryos for the study members using assisted reproduction. Then they figure out each embryo's sex using a process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). The parents then select a male or female embryo to be implanted in the mother's uterus. In pre-implantation sex selection, prospective parents' eggs and sperm are combined in a petri dish producing several embryos. Doctors then take a single cell from each embryo and test it to see which chromosome it bears. Only embryos of the desired sex are implanted in a woman's womb. The chances that this technique will result in a successful pregnancy that comes to term are similar to those of in vitro fertilization in general: about 20 to 30 percent. This type of sex selection is not cheap -- costs run around $20,000 per attempt.
The process is not new. PGD is also used to screen for genetic defects.
And in about 3 percent of the thousands of PGD procedures conducted in the United States each year, parents are picking the gender of their babies, according to one study. Scientists have for years been debating the ethics and possible health, social and psychological effects of selecting for sex.
Sexual selection is banned in Britain, Canada and several other countries, according to the journal, at least in part because of public concerns that it would lead to sex discrimination.