Can You Choose Your Baby's Sex With IVF? PGT-SD Explained

Sex selection and IVF in India

The legal position

Sex selection is prohibited in India. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act prohibits sex selection before or after conception, and prohibits prenatal sex determination and its disclosure.

This applies regardless of the technology used and regardless of the reason. It applies to preimplantation genetic testing, to prenatal testing, and to ultrasound. It applies whether the request comes from a patient, a family member, or anyone else.

Clinics offering sex selection in India are acting unlawfully. Practitioners face criminal liability, including imprisonment and loss of registration.

Why the law exists

India has a documented history of sex-selective abortion and a resulting distortion of the sex ratio at birth. The legislation was enacted to address that, and enforcement is active.

What this means practically

Your clinic will not tell you the sex of an embryo or a fetus, and should not be asked to. Laboratories performing genetic testing in India withhold sex chromosome information from reports.

If a clinic offers to disclose sex, or advertises "family balancing", that is a reason to go elsewhere — not a service.

The narrow medical exception

Where there is a family history of a serious sex-linked genetic condition — such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy or haemophilia — testing may be permitted under specific legal safeguards, with documented approval, arranged through a genetics service.

This is not a route to sex preference. It applies where the sex of the embryo determines whether a child would be affected by a serious condition, and it requires formal authorisation.

Note that ESHRE PGT guidance recognises this scenario internationally, and specifies that where embryo sexing is used because a specific pathogenic variant cannot be detected, patients must be counselled that all male embryos — affected and unaffected — will be discarded, and that carrier females cannot be distinguished from unaffected females.

If you are under family pressure

Pressure to have a child of a particular sex is real for many people in India, and it can come from family rather than from you.

Your clinician cannot help with this, and asking places them at risk of criminal liability. If you are experiencing pressure, that is worth raising with a counsellor rather than with your fertility clinic.

Reviewer note

This page requires legal review before publication. The statutory position described reflects the PCPNDT Act, but a healthcare lawyer should confirm the current position and the precise scope of the medical exception.

What your clinic has actually signed

This is worth knowing if you are considering asking. Every ART and surrogacy clinic in India signs a sworn affidavit at registration undertaking that it will neither engage itself nor its centre in any technique or method capable of pre-conception or pre-natal determination of sex, nor disclose the sex of a foetus to anybody.

The clinic director also accepts personal vicarious liability, and undertakes to explain the PC&PNDT Act to every employee.

So a request for sex disclosure is not something a clinician can quietly accommodate. It puts their registration, their livelihood and their liberty at risk — and asking places them in a genuinely difficult position. They will decline, and they are right to.

Legal position described as of August 2026. This is not legal advice.