Going in to my 20-week ultrasound almost two years ago I knew I was having a boy. The technician said she was having a run on girls that morning, and I confidently told her, 'Well, I'm going to break your streak. It's a boy.' A moment later she said, 'It's a girl' and my heart sank.
I quickly tried to push the disappointment aside and get excited about a little girl. I felt like I was a horrible mother already, only 20 weeks in. It seemed most women would be happy 'as long as it is healthy,' the saying goes, right?
Well that doesn't seem to be the case. Recently there has been a lot of attention paid to the idea of 'gender disappointment.' An MSNBC online poll, which garnered more than 6,000 votes, asked: 'Parents: be honest: Were you disappointed when you discovered your baby's gender?' The majority, 69% said that gender didn't matter and that they weren't upset, but about a third said they were disappointed-with 22% saying they were sad but got over it quickly and around 9% saying they were disappointed and sometimes think they are still not over it.
I think the fact that the poll question was prefaced with 'be honest' speaks volumes. There are so many parenthood taboos: admitting your infant was a loaf of bread with arms the first few weeks (just me?), wondering if you'll be able to handle going back to work on so little sleep and with so much stress - and being disappointed with you child's gender.
While I had to wait five months to find out I was having a girl, and truly now can't imagine my life without a daughter, a new blood test apparently can reveal gender as early as five weeks, say Dutch researchers whose findings were recently reported in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology. And while finding out earlier may give you more time to get into the groove and reimagine your baby, it also brings up the issue of selective abortion, in addition to sex-selection techniques such as in-vitro fertilization methods and sperm sorting.
In an arguably less-extreme approach, as we've written about before, lots of folklore and a slew of books on the market claim to help couples choose their baby's gender more naturally (although the success of such techniques is questionable.)