Nearly 40 Years of Success!

How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby
by Landrum B. Shettles, M.D., Ph.D., David M. Rorvik

For almost forty years, How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby has been the standard reference for couples trying to increase their chances of having the son or daughter they hope for. In this new edition of their classic book, Dr. Shettles and David Rorvik provide authoritative scientific studies and compelling anecdotal evidence demonstrating that the Shettles method continues to produce results unmatched by any other method. Dozens of testimonials confirm its ease of use and rate of success.

How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby explains the simple, at-home, noninvasive Shettles method and presents detailed steps to take to conceive a child of a specific gender. The properly applied Shettles method gives couples a 75 percent or better chance of having a child of the desired sex. Some researchers have reported success rates of up to 90 percent!

Forty years! We find it hard to believe ourselves. For nearly four decades now, prospective parents from Biloxi to Bombay, Chicago to Cape Town, Seattle to Shanghai have been using our method to choose the sex of their children. Millions of people throughout the world have used the Shettles method with consistent good results, making us the past, the present, and, we trust, the future number-one guide to sex selection on the planet.

During those four decades, we have faced plenty of competition and quite a few "imitators" of our method. But as the competition has come and gone, the Shettles method has persisted, fueled primarily by satisfied word of mouth. Were it not for couples who have used our method with success and reported this to their friends and neighbors, we, too, would long since have fallen by the wayside. Failure doesn't keep anything going for years, let alone 40 years. Only success can do that. And so, to you, our faithful readers, some of whom have used our method to attain not merely one child of the desired sex but two or more, often creating gender-balanced families in the process, we express our heartfelt thanks and appreciation.

And to those of you completely new to our book and our method, we say Welcome. We are delighted to add you to our ever-growing "family" and trust that you, too, will add to your families the children you will cherish, whatever their genders.

Since we last revised this book, some other sex-selection methods have come along, both low tech and high tech. We will be talking more about these later on. But, as usual, we have noted that when something "new" is announced in this field, it is often really just a restatement or a variation on components of the Shettles method.

By the same token, findings that sometimes claim to refute the Shettles method generally fail when they are more closely scrutinized or more thoroughly followed up over longer periods of time. We will provide examples of this later on. We will also tell you about some high-tech methods of sex selection, both old and newly emerging ones, that, unlike the Shettles method, are generally opposed by bioethicists and by the majority of doctors and medical professionals, for reasons we will discuss. We are confident that most couples will continue to find our approach to sex selection the easiest, the most natural, and the most reliable, as well as the most ethical.

This is the sixth revision of our book since it was first published in April 1970. It contains all of the latest sex-selection data. Our method has been consistently effective and consistently refined over the years to make it easier and more comfortable for all to use. Our success rate continues to be 75 percent or better for those seeking girls and 80 percent for those who seek boys. And the rate of success is even higher among those who have reported to us on our questionnaires (see later in this book) that they were "highly confident" that they had precisely pinpointed the time of ovulation-a key factor in the Shettles method.

In the pages ahead, you'll hear from a number of those who have tried the method-and we'll be answering questions many of you have sent us since our last edition appeared several years ago. Again, congratulations for joining the sex-selection team that has been getting results in more than twenty countries for forty years. At a national meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Dr. Shettles was credited with having published "the landmark paper," in the early 1960s, which made sex preselection a subject that could and should be taken seriously. By having made the decision to investigate and, we hope, use sex selection yourself, you have become part of a landmark effort that we believe will continue to flourish.

Dr. Shettles' Track Record

Though the Shettles method remains "theory" and is disputed by some, you should be aware that Dr. Shettles has a formidable record for being both ahead of his time and right. He and Dr. John Rock of Harvard were the first to fertilize human eggs in vitro, launching what is today a revolution in fertility research. But it took literally decades for other researchers to follow up on their pioneering work. In the 1960s, Dr. Shettles discovered a method of obtaining fetal cells that could be used to assess fetal health and rescue distressed pregnancies, detect defects, and so on. Other researchers said they could not duplicate his research or simply ignored it-despite its enormous implications. Finally, researchers in mainland China reported they had duplicated the work, and this was then followed up on by researchers in Indiana, who finally realized the full import of the development and credited Dr. Shettles with its discovery. Today this technique (called chorionic villi sampling) has partially supplanted the more dangerous amniocentesis as a method of monitoring fetal health-and, unlike amniocentesis, it can be used from the very earliest stages of pregnancy with minimal invasion.

Then, in 1979, Dr. Shettles reported on another technique he had developed by which a fertilized egg could be surgically transferred directly into a woman's fallopian tube to achieve pregnancies that could otherwise not occur, owing to various infertility problems. At first, this technique, which has come to be known as gamete intrafallopian transfer, or GIFT-and it truly is a gift to many of the infertile-also was ignored and no credit was given. But GIFT rapidly became one of the crown jewels in the armamentarium of infertility research and treatment and is today regarded as one of the most important developments in that field in the twentieth century.

Finally, in 1991, in an editorial in the Journal of in Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer, Dr. Shettles was given long-overdue credit and hailed as the father of GIFT. The editorial concluded:

In the case of GIFT a scan of the medical literature of the past 15 years clearly shows that L. B. Shettles should be credited with the introduction of the concept of transferring gametes into the fallopian tubes as a means of achieving a pregnancy. Frederick P. Zuspan, editor of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, in his letter to Shettles notifying him of the acceptance for publication of his landmark paper, stated the need for its publication "as soon as possible as it opens new avenues for therapy."

Dr. Shettles, who was once described by Omni magazine as "one of the twentieth century's titans in the field of female infertility," is delighted that he's still challenging orthodoxy right into the twenty-first century.

Copyright © 2006 by Landrum B. Shettles.

About the Author

Landrum B. Shettles, M.D., Ph.D., was an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of research at the New York Fertility Foundation. He is the coauthor of From Conception to Birth: The Drama of Life's Beginnings.

David Rorvik is a former Time magazine science and medicine reporter and has contributed articles to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Reader's Digest, and other magazines.