They had their dog choose which IVF-conceived baby to implant

A couple expecting twins conceived through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) selected the gender of one of their children through sheer luck: by throwing a tennis ball to their dog. But this seemingly cheerful story about letting a dog choose which child got to be born and which children remained frozen only further illustrates the commodifying nature of IVF.

Serena Cukjati told TODAY.com that she and her husband struggled to get pregnant, and with each negative test, she would cry… only to be comforted by Charlie, her goldendoodle. “He would just lay with me,” she said. “There were so many low points in our journey to conceive, and he would pull me out of the darkness.”

This summer, she and her husband had been pursuing IVF when they found out they had three high-quality embryos to choose from: two girls, and one boy. Despite having created three children, they only wanted to implant one of the embryos, and couldn’t decide which to choose. “We were ecstatic. But all of the sudden we had this decision in front of us — do we transfer the boy or the girl? We just couldn’t decide,” she said. “It’s a really cool perk, and a First World problem for sure, but it also felt like a burden. It was just too much.” So they decided to let Charlie “choose” for them.

They threw two tennis balls, one labeled “girl” and the other “boy.” Whichever he brought back to them would be the embryo he chose, and he chose a boy.

The couple implanted the male embryo, seemingly leaving the two female embryos frozen, only to be surprised with twins anyway; the male embryo split, leaving them now expecting identical twin boys.

“When you are commissioning and swiping your credit card for a product, even one that you want badly, you are participating in commodification, regardless of whether the intended parents are the biological parents of the surrogate-born children,” Katie Breckenridge, of the children’s rights advocacy organization Them Before Us, previously told Live Action News. “In this case, the products are human beings.”