Choosing the sex of your baby

CNN Many couples trying to conceive a child have at least some inkling of whether they want a girl or a boy. These preferences have made some resort to less-than-surefire methods, from taking vitamins to timing when they have sex in order to influence gender. Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds.

Kathleen McKinnon always planned to start a family, but it proved to be harder than she imagined. But her company, like many others in the Bay Area tech community, subsidizes costly assisted-reproduction techniques, including in vitro fertilization IVF , for families like McKinnon's. In , after two failed attempts, she was thrilled to learn that the procedure was successful, and she had six healthy embryos. After the procedure, McKinnon's doctors performed an extra screening step that has become increasingly popular in recent years to look for health issues and other factors. During that process, she learned the sex of the embryos based on their chromosomal makeup — XX for female, XY for male.

Many parents swear by at-home methods of gender selection. But can you really sway the odds? Ellen Durston, a newspaper reporter in Chicago, always wanted her first child to be female. Durston came across a technique pioneered 30 years ago by the late obstetrics researcher Landrum Shettles, M. Would Zoe have been Zachary if the couple had left it to chance?

If you're the kind of person who has been planning your perfect family unit since your Barbie Dream House days, there is a way to guarantee it. Whether your idea of familial perfection is one boy and one girl, in that order, or you've got some other mix in mind, you don't have to leave it up to chance. Shayne M. First, there is in vitro fertilization, or IVF -- the only scientifically sound way to guarantee results, according to Plosker.