A Bellevue fertility clinic caused controversy this week when it placed an advertisement in a British Columbia newspaper for treatment that allows families to choose their child’s gender.

The ad, which ran Tuesday in the Indo-Canadian Voice, a paper geared towards immigrants from India, features children dressed in traditional outfits, boasting the benefits of the procedure.

Bellevue-based Washington Center for Reproductive Medicine ran the ad in the paper because parts of that community show a desire to have more male children, Ramainder Dosanjh, an activist with the India Mahila Organization, told British Columbia TV.

“You are going to internalize that discrimination, and you are going to start believing there is something wrong,” she said.

It is illegal in Canada for families to undergo these types of procedures, but no such law exists in the U.S. Representatives of the fertility clinics did not return calls to the Reporter requesting comments.

According to a number of surveys around the nation, about half of all fertility clinics offer these types of gender selection services, most of them just don’t advertise it.