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
About Maureen
Click to play the Fountains of Wayne song about Maureen!
"Maureen, you're givin' me too much information!"
My Kiddies
My DH
(And never had a fight!)
About Me
In 1999, my two sons were 4 and 2 years old, and we were ready to have another baby. I hoped to have a daughter, and I turned to the Internet to search for ways of increasing the odds of conceiving a girl. I discovered the iVillage Gender Determination Board. On the board, I found information about at-home and high-tech sex selection methods, but more importantly, I discovered I wasn't alone. I was one among a legion of mothers who longed desperately for a daughter, keeping it a secret so others wouldn't think, wrongly, that we loved our sons less, and feeling guilty becuse we're not supposed to care if a baby's a boy or a girl, "as long as it's healthy". There were, of course, also mothers hoping just as much to add a son to their all-girl family.
After a lot of research and soul-searching, my husband I decided to try MicroSort. In the fall of 2000, I became pregnant on our first MicroSort attempt, by IUI. At 20 weeks of pregnancy, we discovered we were having twins, a boy and a girl! We were thrilled to have a daughter at last, and a new son to cherish too.
During my journey to conceive a daughter, I was so grateful for the support and information volunteered by others on the boards; mothers who didn't even know me, but were willing to help me, hope for me, and cry along with me, when there was no one I could turn to "in real life". I know that without being able to talk personally with women who had tried MicroSort, I would have never gone through with this daunting, complex procedure; and that we would have never had a daughter as part of our family.
Now that my journey's finished, this Web site is just my way of giving some of that help back, to you.