A clinic at Phuket International Hospital is one of the few places where so-called “family balancing” is available – using an in-vitro fertilisation procedure known as Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD).
Baby sex-selection is banned in Australia, but more than 100 Australian couples travelled to Thailand for the procedure last year – that’s up by a third from the year before.
Both the Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok and the Phuket International Hospital openly offer PGD services on their websites.
A report on Tuesday in Australian media quoted the representative of a medical tourism company as saying the sex-selection procedure in Thailand is a growth niche industry.
“It's increasing by about 30 per cent annually,” said Cassandra Italia, from medical tourism company Global Health Travel.
“In 2011, we sent 72 Australian couples over and in 2012, we sent 106 couples.”
The Thailand treatment involves testing a woman's embryo for chromosomes, which determine the gender of the child.
Ethical opposition to choosing a baby's sex before birth often is criticised as a system of “designer babies.”
Ms Italia said her clients are almost all Australians who have had children of one sex, and wish to “balance the family.”
“Our clients are generally a family where there is one predominant sex,” she said.
“In one case, the mother had a boy from a previous relationship and then she had five girls with her second partner.
“They really wanted to have a boy and tried this treatment twice and ended up having a boy.”