The modern world is full of marvels, and nowhere more so than in the world of medicine. As researchers probe the inner workings of life, it’s becoming possible to learn more than ever before about our biology. Things that were once a mystery are now just a matter of routine investigation. It’s quite incredible.
You can learn an enormous amount about your baby before he or she is even born. Parents can find out whether they are likely to develop prenatal diseases, whether the placenta is healthy and what might affect their health in the future. It’s even possible to get a prenatal paternity test that uses nothing more than a blood sample from the mother and a cheek swab from the alleged father. In a world like this, discovering the gender of your child seems almost trivial.
Something strange is going on, though. Instead of jumping at the opportunity to find out whether their baby is a boy or a girl so that they can plan, a large chunk of parents decides to wait until birth. What’s going on here? Why wait?
Here are some of the most common reasons parents give.
The Test Could Be Wrong
Science isn’t perfect. In fact, there have been just as many blunders in science as there have been in any other professional field. Science gets things wrong. Measuring devices get things wrong. And, more often, the people operating them do too.
Some parents, therefore, look at the technology for what it is and conclude that it’s just not reliable enough to give them a definitive answer. Sure it might look like they’re going to have a boy or a girl, but ultrasound can be deceiving.
Mistakes are costly. Parents could end up furnishing their homes in expectation of a baby boy, only to find it’s a girl with substantially different needs.
The Love of the Anticipation
Birth is a special event. What’s more, for the majority of human history, parents didn’t have a clue what gender their child had. Interfering in that natural cycle by knowing ahead of time seems to take some of the joy out of life. Birth isn’t just a mechanical process – it’s something to be anticipated and shared. When the parents know the gender, it can feel as if some of the magic is lost.
No Matter What the Gender, Babies Always Defy Expectation
When parents imagine their child, they often end up with a particular image in their heads. Babies, however, have other plans. The majority of children emerge from the womb utterly different from what their parents expected, not just in terms of looks, but personality as well. Knowing the gender of your baby is a long way from really knowing anything about them at all. Parents, therefore, often choose to meet their children for the first time from scratch without any second-guessing.
This article isn’t meant to convince you either way whether you should discover your child’s gender before they’re born. That’s a decision for you to make. It does, however, provide insight into why some people choose not to do it.
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