Doctors are skeptical about Baby Gender Mentor, says Newsweek
Doctors are skeptical about the claims of Baby Gender Mentor to predict a baby's gender just 5 weeks into pregnancy with 99.9% accuracy, because no evidence has been presented by the company to back up the claim. When asked about the details of the 14-year Acu-Gen trial that predicted the gender of 20,000 babies with 99.9% accuracy, Acu-Gen's president responded:
The accuracy is based on correlation studies between two technology platforms with validated data from actual births spanning more than a decade.
Acu-Gen president C.N. Wang
It's not clear to me that "correlation studies between two technology platforms" means that "the gender Acu-Gen predicted matched the gender of the baby when it was born 999 times out of 1,000" but perhaps that's what he's getting at.
It's really too bad the details of this study aren't available, because there must be so much interesting information there. For example, how often did a false male result due to a male vanishing twin? And how often was a baby born having male or female DNA, but with malformed genitals making it appear to be the opposite sex? These two possibilities have been suggested to women who have reported that ultrasound views of their baby's genitals don't match the Baby Gender Mentor prediction, yet Acu-Gen's trial seems to prove that these anomalies occurred in no more than .1% of the 20,000 pregnancies studied.
It would certainly be interesting to know whether the women involved in the study had a routine ultrasound during their prenatal care, and its outcome.
Wang says that manuscripts are in preparation to be submitted to peer-reviewed journals, so hopefully we will find the answers to these interesting questions soon.
- Gender Bender
A new test claims it can determine fetal gender as early as five weeks into pregnancy. Doctors are skeptical.
Newsweek, Debra Goldschmidt