Waiting for confirmation by an ultrasound if you wait for a girl or boy will be a thing of the past in a few years. According to a review of 57 studies that have been done in the United States a blood test to find out the sex of the baby at seven weeks It is a reliable and safe method.
Compared to amniocentesis, an invasive test that is performed to determine, in addition to sex, congenital problems in the baby, blood tests It does not pose a risk to the mother or the child. And if we compare it with ultrasound, the analysis gives the result much earlier, at the seventh week, shortly after the pregnancy is confirmed, while by ultrasound it is necessary to wait for the second trimester of pregnancy to know the sex of the baby, and not It has absolute reliability.
The technique is to extract a blood sample from the mother to analyze the fragments of non-cellular DNA in the plasma, from the fetus. As of the seventh week, the presence of these fragments in the mother's blood is sufficient to evaluate, in more than 95% of cases, if the fetus is a carrier of the Y chromosome (with what would be a male) or not (so that it would be female).
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US have concluded that the sex of the fetus can be determined correctly by a blood test, beginning in the seventh week, between 95% and 99% of the time, a much higher percentage than that obtained with ultrasound, a technique that is inconclusive in at least 7.5% of cases, when it is performed after the eleventh week.
Spain has been one of the pioneer countries in implanting blood tests to know the sex of the fetus. The first was carried out at the Virgen de las Nieves Hospital in Granada in 2008, a technique covered by public health for families with a history of monogenic diseases.
It remains to wait some time for the cost of the test to make it accessible on a massive level, and so pregnant women will only need a blood test to know the sex of the baby That is coming.
I wonder if on a psychological level it is positive to know the sex of the baby so soon. In the case of a miscarriage, for example, can it affect even more, in addition to the pain of having lost a baby, to know that the boy who was so anxious or the girl who was finally on the way was lost? What do you think?
