Pregnancy

Tests for Gender

Since ancient times, discovering the baby's gender before birth was a mystery that has fascinated humanity, but it was not until our modern times when tests can now predict the gender up to 100% in accuracy to reveal if you are expecting a boy or a girl.

These test reveal the gender of your baby early in pregnancy, whether during a routine ultrasound exam or using other methods of the many available tests that also can also detect genetic abnormalities. Some tests are based on myths and tales surrounding pregnancy, but widely used as an empirical guess.

In fact, new tests are being developed everyday with the same goal. Blood tests are one of them, offering to women the chance of discovering the gender of the baby as early as five weeks along, by detecting and analyzing fetal DNA floating in the woman's blood, but keeping the fear of being used as “designer babies" tests.

Disregarding the method, ethicists are concerned about most tests for gender due to further implications about sex selection and parents deciding to get an abortion because they want a child of the opposite sex, practice commonly observed in many societies and immigrant groups where male babies are preferred over female babies.

The application of biotechnology in medicine has developed tests that allow you to discover the sex of your baby, but the worries about how a woman can use the information obtained in advance are unpredictable. If you want to know if your baby is a boy or a girl to start painting the nursery in one color or another, there is no major problem.

The most reliable are ultrasound and amniocentesis, while at-home tests have proven to be less effective to predict your baby's gender. Some other tests are merely for entertainment purposes, finding the chances of having either a boy or a girl.

Some of those tests predict the gender based on the day that you conceived the baby or the day when the baby's heart begins to beat. Tests based on questions and answers trying to determine the sex of a baby following predetermined patterns, which usually differ from woman to woman, have a questionable accuracy.

Research has shown that most Americans have not strong preference for the sex of the baby to lead a woman to abortion as occurs in China and India , where ethicists found evidence of “sex discrimination", promoting women's abortion on baby's gender.