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A large study conducted in Australia and New Zealand has found that more male babies result from assisted pregnancies and that this could end up altering the gender balance to some extent.

With a warning that this is not a means for selection of the baby’s sex, the researchers admitted to not knowing exactly why this takes place.

The study was conducted by Jishan Dean and co researchers from the School of Women’s and Children’s Health at the University of New South Wales, when more than thirteen thousand samples of in vitro fertilization were examined.

Standard IVF treatments showed that 53 per cent of the babies were male, whereas 50% pregnancies resulting from intracytoplasmic sperm injection resulted in male babies.

Also when the embryos were transferred to the uterus four days after fertilization, more than 54%of the babies were boys. When this process was carried out 2 to 3 days after fertilization, that proportion dropped to 49.9%.

With gender selection already being a trend in certain developing countries where the male– female ratio is unnaturally high for males, it is important that the ratio does not further become unbalanced due to IVF treatments, which are becoming more and more popular in recent times.