Nearly 40 Years of Success!
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 RecordThough 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.
Can We Really Choose the Sex of Our Children?
Yes!One of the reasons Dr. Shettles created the sex–selection method you are about to become familiar with is because so many of his patients at Columbia–Presbyterian Hospital in New York City asked him if there was any way he could help them tip the balance in favor of conceiving a child of a specified gender. Often these patients already had a child of one sex or more than one of the same sex and now, understandably, wanted a child of the opposite sex. Many asked the question with some hesitation, ultimately explaining to Dr. Shettles that other doctors had rebuffed them when they so inquired. Many were emboldened to ask Dr. Shettles this then-delicate question because he had been much in the news for his pioneering work in the field of female infertility. They imagined he might be sympathetic to their longings—and they were right!
Of course, they couldn't know at the time that Dr. Shettles had been asking himself the same question, a question that he would eventually answer not only to the satisfaction of his patients and hundreds of thousands of others around the world but also to his
own satisfaction as he went about creating a family of his own, consisting of three boys and three girls!
Soon Dr. Shettles was not only able to tell couples who had not been able to conceive at all that, with techniques he helped perfect, they could indeed become parents but that it was also possible to choose the sex of one’s children with a high degree of success. The Shettles method, as it has evolved, is
not 100 percent successful. It is wise to keep that in mind at all times. But the method does very significantly increase your chances—elevating them from 50 percent if you do nothing—to better than 75 percent. And, in fact, as you will see later on in this book, some researchers have reported success rates with the Shettles method reaching
90 percent!
What's the Evidence?Next question: What evidence is there in support of Dr. Shettles’ sex-selection theory? The evidence is of two kinds. One kind is “anecdotal” and consists of the reports of thousands of people who say they have successfully used the method. Anecdotal evidence is
not scientific evidence, but it is often very useful and suggestive nonetheless. This is especially true when a significant number of the anecdotes issue from couples who have had three, four, or more children of one sex and then, upon first trying the Shettles method, finally have a child of the opposite sex.
The anecdotal evidence in support of the Shettles method is overwhelming. But it is not, to repeat, scientific evidence. A woman wrote a book several years ago proposing a sex-selection method that conflicted in many ways with that of Dr. Shettles. In some ways it appeared to offer
opposite recommendations. (We will discuss that book in more detail later on, when we examine other sex–selection methods.) The point we wish to make here is that in the introduction to her book, this wo...
