GAY and lesbian couples from South Australia are heading to the U.S. to buy designer babies to order for up to $133,000 each – even specifying the gender they want.
IVF pioneer Dr Jeffrey Steinberg said an increasing number of gay Australians were visiting him at his Californian fertility centre to sidestep Australian law which prohibits surrogacy.
"We see about two or three gay couples from Australia each month and that's about a five-fold increase over the last two years," he told the Sunday Mail.
"We see a lot from Adelaide, which always surprises me because Adelaide is a smaller city."
Dr Steinberg said between 75 to 80 per cent of gay and lesbian couples who came to him for treatment decided to choose the sex of their baby – using controversial embryo screening.
"If they choose gender, about 65 to 70 per cent of male gay couples choose male," he said.
"About 85 to 90 per cent of female couples choose female."
Dr Steinberg's LA-based Fertility Institute has performed the high-tech "sex selection" procedure on about 100 gay and heterosexual couples from Australia since 2005, when the Australian Health Ethics Committee banned the use of IVF technology that allowed gender selection.
Advocates of the ban say there is an ethical dilemma in choosing a baby's sex and question the practice of discarding healthy embryos which are not the gender the parents want.
Gay couples can take into account the physical characteristics and education of egg donors.
The fertilised embryos are then implanted in surrogates who have gone through strict psychological and physical screening.
Dr Steinberg said laws banning surrogacy in Australia were pushing gay couples overseas.
"If you're a gay couple and you want a baby, you need an egg donor and you need a surrogate and in Australia it's getting harder and harder to get egg donors and surrogacy is just not allowed," he said.
"So they have no options . . . and basically if you're going to do surrogacy, the US is the place to do it – especially California.
"California is so friendly (to couples using surrogates) that there's no evidence of the egg donor or the surrogate (in state records)," he said.
"Even on the birth certificate application, it doesn't say `mother' and `father' for the names (of the parents) – it says `parent' and `parent'.
"So the guys can get both of their names on the birth certificate." Dr Steinberg said he was often targeted by people who opposed gay couples becoming parents.
"We sometimes get nasty emails, mostly from religious groups," he said.
"But we also get a huge amount of support. It's starting to become more accepted I think."
Dr Steinberg said about 15 Australian heterosexual couples a month had a child using a surrogate through his centre.