Boy or Girl?: Three Moms' Stories of Gender Selection

Method: Shettles & Microsort

Mom: Alison Passman*

• Why she tried gender selection: "My parents were divorced when I was 13 and I lived with my father. I never got to do the kinds of things a girl does with her mother. I knew I wanted to have daughters so I could share all the things I later realized that I missed out on as a child."
• Strategy: Landrum Shettles' technique, from his book How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby (Main Street Books)
• Experience: "When we decided to try again after having two sons, I bought the Shettles book. From conception, the pregnancy felt different from the others. The news from my doctor that this was yet another boy literally left me on the floor crying. My husband didn't know what to do with me.
  
  We decided to try one more time. This time, we signed up for Microsort. We put in our deposit, and got the ball rolling. On the day my husband was supposed to supply his sperm sample, he called me and said he just couldn't do it. He said he was willing to try again but not that way. I had to respect what he wanted, so we gave up Microsort and decided to try Shettles again."
• Outcome: "I don't know if it made any difference, but this time around we both cut caffeine completely from our diet. I conceived soon afterward and found out the day before Thanksgiving that we were having a girl."

*pseudonym