To think some people treat IVF like ordering a designer baby?

No one I know has ever been like this when they have done IVF. People often choose their partners based on things like looks and intelligence though. None of my friends chose to have children with the first boy they fancied, they tended to be a bit more picky when it came to having babies with someone.

Come off it, you can't even accurately select the baby's gender NOW, never mind 20 years ago 🙄

What traits are you talking about? There is no such thing in existence. I've spent years doing fertility treatment, and it simply doesn't exist in the UK. We can't even know the sex of our embryos.

No one? Of course they do! I went through IVF 20 years ago and I knew arseholes back then who were using it to have a daughter 🙄. It’s not the majority by any stretch but you can’t deny it happens.

You do know ivf isn’t anywhere close to 100% successful, you can’t even guarantee it will work.

I've seen this and agree it's awful.
A woman I knew told me all this quite openly, they conceived first child via IVF because of infertility naturally but decided not to pay more to choose the sex. She was devastated when it was a girl and was saying how much she regretted not paying the extra. For the second one they did pay and got the boy they wanted. I knew her soon after first's birth and then a few years more but it put me off her hugely to hear this attitude. Especially because she made absolutely no secret of her distaste for eldest girl. Even now 10 years later she's posting #mumofboys #wefoughtforyou #beingaboysmomrocks type shit.
This was all occurring in an Eastern European country.

I've never heard of anyone doing that before. I've heard ivf being casually talked about like saying "just do ivf" like it's easy though. That must be very annoying for people who have been through it.

Influencers aren’t real life and a lot of what they do is abusive parenting. If everyone ignored family influencers they would have no influence. Watch them, it’s your fault as well.

Who on earth are you following on IG?

I haven't seen this at all.

The Sunday Times ran an article about the world of VIP IVF and embryo selection a few months ago. It was astonishing what they can do nowadays. But it is an American thing. British prospective parents have to go to the US for it. You can't do it here.

I think it’s a very small group of people you’re looking at. I also think the United States has very poor standards of ethics in some aspects of fertility treatment.

I did IVF in Australia in 2023, and had a vastly different experience. Australia, similar to the UK, uses a much stronger code of ethics in their practice. People don’t do IVF for designer babies - it’s not about parents being unwilling to accept the traits of a naturally conceived child.

IVF patients are infertile (including socially infertile, the absence of an opposite sex partner) or they need to use IVF to prevent a genetic illness, or for another medical reason.

I am a carrier for some appalling genetic diseases - spinal muscular atrophy, Batten disease and Cystic fibrosis. There’s no way I’d knowingly pass these conditions on to a child so genetic testing was not to look at baby’s eye colour it was medically important. My husband wasn’t a carrier, but we had a lot of peace of mind from genetic carrier screening and genetic testing of embryos for disease only.

I also have PCOS and despite being in my mid 20s, was unable to conceive naturally. IVF was a medical need if I wanted to conceive, not a choice.

We were thrilled to have a daughter, but would have been equally delighted with a son. We didn’t have the legal option to select an embryo to implant based on its sex.

I’ve never met another IVF parent who didn’t have a very sad, very personal reason for having fertility treatment. It’s expensive, invasive and often heartbreaking and I hate that anyone would thing people do it as a “consumer project” or to create a baby somehow better or more attractive than a child they’d naturally conceived.

By selecting traits, do you mean picking embryos that do not have genetic health conditions? Some people do use IVF to, I guess, select certain traits such as not carrying a particular gene but this is where the parents know they carry something that can be deadly. Or sometimes the parents have had a child with a genetic condition that has sadly meant the child died. You can’t exactly pick an embryo that will be good at maths and science but not very arty. Or one that will be at least 6ft tall.

There are cases where people will have healthy embryos with equal chance of success of both sexes and they have a preference on sex so will choose a girl embryo over a boy embryo. Nobody who desperately wants a child, and has put their body through IVF, is picking a boy embryo that has less chance of implanting or carries a genetic condition over a girl embryo that has a better chance of success.

It's vile isn't it?

You clearly know absolutely nothing about the realities of the IVF process. Well done for such a goady and upsetting post.

Well, if it was in the Guardian, then obviously it must be true- and everyone is doing it! 🙄

I think that is such a small portion of the IVF population. Same with extreme plastic surgeries, or anything questionable that has nothing to do with actual life. These clips / accounts are designed to make money, so the more crazy the better (for them). Half of it probably isn’t even true. Like some PPs have said a lot of it isn’t legal in Europe. I wouldn’t say that there’s a trend where all of humanity is heading - it’s literally a few people online that are probably not even doing it because they’re desperate for a child.

Post links to said Instagram and TikTok accounts where people are doing any of this. ^

US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’ | Genetics | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-charging-couples-to-screen-embryos-for-iq

This. ^

Utter nonsense @MyHazelCritic No-one does this when they're having IVF FFS!

I have worked with tons of families that have achieved pregnancies through IVF and not once have I ever met anyone who treated it as a "consumer project". I have seen determination, and heartbreak, and lives savings poured into it, and physical and emotional health battered by it, but not once ever seen it as a choice that anyone wanted to have made.

This is more a US thing, where people, often gay or single men, talk about choosing egg donors - supermodels, ivy league students, that sort of thing.

IVF is horrific, you'd have to be very determined.
I do have a designer ivf baby, genetically selected so they have a slightly less shit life. Not got a curated image though!

Sometimes I'd raise an eye at the embryo banking for a specific gender I'd see in the US on support groups (it's not permitted here so makes your claims less likely) but that's their choice.