Latest news with #genderselection
News.com.au
15-05-2025
- Health
- News.com.au
‘For me': Single mum defends banned baby act
An Aussie mother who has been the centre of controversy over her decision to choose her baby's gender has defended her actions on radio. Caitlin Bailey, from Melbourne, is a single mum with two sons and a daughter. However, she always wanted two children of each biological sex so she spent $45,000 to fly to America for IVF treatment that allowed her to fulfil this dream. Gender selection is banned in Australia due to the ethics involved, meaning Ms Bailey had to use the services of Californian doctor Daniel Potter via Gender Selection Australia. But, her actions divided public opinion — and now the 31-year-old influencer is defending her decision to do so. She told The Fox's Fifi, Fev & Nick that she knew she'd face a lot of judgement for going through with it but at the end of the day it was 'my body, my family'. 'People don't know me. The media will take what they want to take. I'd be silly to think they're not going to do that. I can assure you that I'm a good person and I love my kids. I would do anything for my children, at the end of the day they are the most important thing in the world to me. I'm not doing this to make other people upset or cause controversy,' she said. 'I purely made this choice for me. There are so many different arguments and opinions. It does hurt my feelings when I see negative comments. I don't want that, and I don't mean to hurt these people.' Ms Bailey said she documented her journey on her social media account, where she boasts 60,000 followers, because there was no one on her feed like her. 'I'm not telling people, 'You should all do sex-selection, and you should do this too.' I'm just saying it's an option,' she said. 'We've got the technology and medical advancement to make this an option.' Radio star Fifi Box defended Ms Bailey's decision, saying when she was going through IVF with her second pregnancy she thought it would be much easier to have another daughter. The Aussie media personality said she thought it was a 'shame' that Ms Bailey felt the need to defend herself. One of the big points brought up in the last few days is how much money Ms Bailey spent, which she said came from her savings. The influencer argued that she could have spent that much money on IVF anyway, and that she was saving money because if she tried to conceive naturally she would have kept going until she had another daughter. 'I think it's more responsible to do it this way than try to have another three or four kids, and if I kept having boys I would still feel like I wouldn't have felt that content feeling,' she said. Sex selection is banned in Australia, however it was temporarily available in New South Wales between 1999 and 2004. Now, the only caveat is certain medical exemptions based on gender — for instance if a couple carries genes for conditions such as muscular dystrophy, which predominantly impacts males.
News.com.au
13-05-2025
- Health
- News.com.au
Aussie mum sparks national debate after revealing she travelled to the US to seek IVF and choose the gender of her fourth child
An Australian mother has sparked a national debate after she travelled to the US for fertility treatment to choose the gender of her fourth child. Influencer Caitlin Bailey told the Herald Sun that she spent $45,000 to attend a fertility clinic in Los Angelos to conceive a baby girl. The mother of two boys and one girl aged between one and five always wanted two of each sex, so she contacted Gender Selection Australia (GSA) about conceiving another girl as a single parent. The clinic puts Australian families in touch with Californian-based fertility doctor Daniel Potter, who specialises in gender selection to balance families as well as genetic disease screening. Gender selection to balance families is generally banned in Australia, so hundreds of Australian families travel overseas to choose the gender of their baby via IVF, according to GSA's website. The practice is only permitted in Australia to reduce the risk of transmitting serious genetic conditions, diseases or abnormalities from future generations. Connect IVF scientific director Lauren Hiser said while it was possible to know the sex of an embryo prior to it being transferred to a woman's uterus, sex could only be selected in Australia when a genetic component was involved in IVF. Gender selection through IVF was available in NSW between 1999 and 2004, which Ms Hiser said was used mostly for family balancing reasons so people could select the sex they were desiring before pregnancy. 'Whenever people hear about sex selection, they are always very concerned that people are selecting boys over girls, that's the first thing that comes to people's mind,' she said. 'If you look into the data when it was available in NSW, between 1999 and 2004 the ratios did not change. 'In the patients that were able to select based solely on sex, they were actually choosing more girls and doing it for family balancing reasons. 'But sex selection is happening in Australia, it's just not happening within the IVF realm.' A La Trobe University study found that Australian families were terminating pregnancies following non-invasive prenatal testing to find out the sex of their child. Researchers found a cultural preference for sons among some ethnic groups led to more boys than girls being born in Victoria. The naturally occurring ratio worldwide was 105 boys born to every 100 girls; however, the study showed there were 108 and 109 boys born respectively to Indian and Chinese-born mothers for every 100 girls born between 1999-2015 in Victoria. La Trobe Judith Lumley Centre lead researcher Kristina Edvardsson believed some women may be terminating pregnancies after discovering they were expecting a girl and, in other cases, travelled overseas to access non-medical sex selection services through assisted reproduction. 'We know even Australian-born women and men can choose to go overseas and select the sex of their baby, but what we can see from the sex ratios in the Australian-born group is that it's not skewed to any gender,' she said. Ms Hiser said gender selection and whether it should be introduced to minimise harm was an ethical discussion. 'If there are people already getting pregnant, then testing a pregnancy and choosing to terminate, well, could we as an industry stop that from happening?' she said. 'Could we select an embryo before it becomes a pregnancy so people do not have to go through medical terminations or anything more drastic?' Ms Hiser said other international jurisdictions introduced gender selection as a way of reducing infanticide, backyard abortions and other things that could cause harm. 'We have a group of people in Australia that are looking for the services and are willing to travel internationally to achieve that,' she said. 'We have great IVF service in Australia that can do all that, but we are sending our patients overseas to jurisdictions that may not be as well set up, that have higher risks associated and certainly higher costs. 'There's a lot of ethical considerations to be had if we should be selecting for sex or not.' Ms Hiser said reproductive technology laws in Australia sent a lot of citizens overseas to seek treatment. 'People looking for surrogacy, it's not easy to do in Australia so they go overseas, certainly for sex selection and some donor situations as well,' she said. 'Because our laws don't support it, it's easier for people to access that outside of Australia.'
