We haven't decided on circumcision yet. While I appreciate the fact that everyone has opinions on the subject, I feel it's a pretty personal choice for parents to make.
Anyways, my wife came across this company (
www.genetree.com) that does very early gender testing based on a small blood sample from pregnant mothers... they claim accuracy as early as 6 weeks after conception (that's about 8 weeks pregnant on the normal 40 week schedule). She asked her Mom if she had ever heard of it (she's an RSN and now does medical research evaluation for a University) and while she hadn't, some research showed it to be legit and now my mother in law wants to do it.
I don't have any problem with it, personally. We were going to find out during the 18-20 week ultrasound anyways, so it doesn't change anything for us, but I balked at the fee for the service - $250! Her Mom wants to pay for it (she's fairly "well to do" so it's not a big deal) so whatever.
Anyways, we'll know the sex of the baby in ~3 weeks or so, which is pretty cool, imo. I think/hope it's a boy, she wants a girl, but we don't REALLY care either way. I bring all this up because it's a) interesting, to me at least and b) raises some interesting questions.
Since they can determine gender with 99% accuracy during the first trimester with this test, and relatively inexpensively ($250 is a lot of money, but it's not absurd by any stretch especially considering how much it costs to have a baby anyways) there's concern that people who really want to have a specific gender will use the test and abort the fetus if it's not the one they want. With the more traditional methods people don't know the sex until at least half way through, which is typically too late to abort the pregnancy without good medical reason.
Now, as I said, we don't really care what we have, but I can certainly see the concerns of people surrounding this kind of testing. What to you all think?
