How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby
Written: Sep 01 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: gives explicit directions to attempt to conceive the baby of the gender of your choice
Cons: doesn't guarantee success, just improves your chances
The Bottom Line: If you are really interested in trying for a specific sex, this book will give you some helpful tips to improve your odds. Just remember - it's not 100% effective!
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| serc's Full Review: |
It is no secret that my husband and I are thinking of adding another member to our family, and it is also not a big secret that we would like a girl to complete our family. I decided to check out the most recent edition of How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby by Landrum B. Shettles, M.D., Ph.D., and David M. Rorvik to find out if there was anything that we could do to improve our odds. I read through the whole thing in about three days; it is fairly interesting reading and most of it is easy to understand.
The Information You Probably Wanted From the Book
How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby is broken up into four sections, with the actual "how to" part sandwiched into section three. If you are very busy or not interested in the history and ethics of sex selection, I will tell you right here that you should jump right to that section and study it thoroughly before trying for a child of a specific gender. Section three, How to Use the Shettles Method Successfully is the heart of the book, and it explains how to determine when you ovulate and how to use that information to select either a girl or a boy.
Shettles and Rorvik suggest tracking your cervical mucus and Basal Body Temperature (BBT) to determine time of ovulation. The research that Shettles has done suggests that XY (which produce boys) sperm are faster, but weaker, while XX sperm (which produce girls) are slower but stronger. The basic suggestion is to try to conceive well before ovulation occurs for a girl; for a boy, to try to conceive in the 24 hours before ovulation. So, for a girl, the idea is to basically have intercourse early and hope that most of the XY sperm will die off before ovulation. (Seems a little brutal, doesn’t it?)
Other things, such as sexual positions and frequency of intercourse are also covered.
Section three also has a helpful question and answer segment at the end that might answer something that the text doesn’t make clear. If nothing else, this makes for some pretty interesting reading.
Other Stuff in the Book
Section one of the book is called Can We Do It? Should We Do It? It briefly describes Dr. Shettles’ career in fertility research and describes the research that suggests that it is possible to select the sex of your child. The authors address the concern that sex selection would lead to a world with too many boys; they have found that people usually want one child of each gender to complete their families. (This is true of us, although two boys would be fine, and two girls would have been fine. This will be our last child, though, so if I want the experience of having a daughter, this is it.)
The second section is entitled The Emergence of a Scientific Sex Selection Method. There is some great stuff in this section on how people have tried to select their children’s sex in the past… some of it either horrifying or hilarious, depending on your perspective. (For example, at one point it was thought that the right testicle produced boy-producing sperm, the left testicle girl-producing sperm. So for a boy, just tie off that left testicle… ouch!) The authors also review the basics of reproduction (on a cellular level), discuss a bit more evidence for their method, and compare to other current sex selection methods.
The final section of the book is called Sex Selection in the Near and Distant Future. I found this section to be the least interesting, partly because it wasn’t relevant to me, and partly because any more technical or accurate sex selection technique is likely to be many years away.
Also included at the end of the book is a questionnaire for people who use the Shettles method which asks very detailed information about whether or not you have succeeded with conceiving the child with the sex you desired and exactly what you did and did not do. The questions are pretty interesting, but I wonder how many people send their questionnaires in… some of the questions are, of necessity, kind of… uh… personal.
Throughout the book, it is emphasized that no one should try to select the sex of their child if they are not willing or able to accept and love a child of either gender. No method is 100% effective for sex selection, and they strongly discourage the use of abortion for sex selection purposes.
One more thing to note about the book is that it is actually written by David Rorvik; he works with Dr. Shettles and bases his writing on Shettles’ research. This causes Shettles to be referred to in the text in the third person rather than the first person, which might strike you as odd if you don’t realize how their collaboration works.
On the whole, I thought this was an excellent read, and I may find a use for the information in the future. If you are interested in increasing your chances of having a child of a particular sex, it can’t hurt to give this method a try, and it might help. And even if you wind up with a baby of the sex you didn’t try to select… you are still going to wind up with a baby, and any baby is pretty great!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
serc
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 in Books |
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Member: Sara Robinson-Coolidge
Location: Northfield, MN
Reviews written: 969
Trusted by: 346 members
About Me:
mother of two kids, student nurse, feminist, bibliophile, and compulsive Epinions writer
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