Moms Talk: Should You Find Out a Baby’s Gender Before Birth?

Finding out the gender of your unborn child has always been a waiting game. In the old days, which I guess includes when I was born in the 1970s, parents had to wait to hear “It’s a [insert gender here]!” in the delivery room. In the more recent past, the wait was cut in half - parents these days usually find out whether their baby is a boy or girl at around 20 weeks, when an ultrasound technician can point out what she sees (or doesn’t see) on a computer screen. And more invasive tests like an amniocentesis can reveal the gender a few weeks earlier, but not everyone takes that test due to the risk of miscarriage associated with it.

The wait time on the big reveal of a baby’s gender could soon get even shorter – down to just 7 weeks – now that a simple blood test has been proven highly accurate in a study published this month by The Journal of the American Medical Association. According to a story in the New York Times, the new blood test “analyzes fetal DNA found in the mother’s blood…establish[ing] sex weeks earlier than other options.” Similar blood tests have been on the market in the recent past, The Times story says, but their use hasn’t been widespread because of concerns over their accuracy, with companies facing lawsuits and closing down after parents complained about inaccurate results.

The Times story lays out the concerns that could very well arise from widespread use of early prenatal gender testing. The biggest and most extreme one seems to be that parents would find out their baby was going to be their, uh, second favorite gender, and may choose to have an abortion. For that reason, at least on testing company requires parents to sign a waiver that they aren’t using the test for gender selection purposes, and the tests haven’t been sold in countries where there is a tradition of prizing baby boys over girls, such as China, the story says. In other cases, if there is a deadly gender-based genetic disease in the family tree, parents would be able to make a determination, or more accurately a gut-wrenching choice, about the fate of their child that much sooner along in a pregnancy.

Thankfully, the vast majority of parents in America aren’t facing moral dilemmas such as those. For them, a gender test at 7-weeks would just let them find out a few weeks earlier what color to paint the nursery, or would help them narrow down to a one-gendered list of names for the baby.