This came up in a British sitcom I’ve been watching. A pregnant woman’s friend knows the sex of her baby, and the woman begs her friend not to tell her.
Here in the States, according to a cite I read, 50-70 percent of expectant moms/couples want to know the sex of the baby before birth, and the number was slightly higher in France.
The cite didn’t mention anywhere else. As regards the British, an Irish woman I watch (and yes, I know Britain and Ireland are different places) states that n most of Europe, it’s basically unheard of to buy things for the baby before she’s born (she was utterly aghast that Americans do it). In some places it even portends bad luck according to local superstition.
So do you Brits tend to avoid finding out the sex of your baby? And do you, as my Irish friend suggests, eschew buying things for the baby until she’s born?
With the first baby, as the date approaches you buy the essentials — a cot, bedding, a stock of newborn babygrows, an enormous pile of muslin puke-rags, etc. You’re going to need them, and you won’t have a lot of time for shopping after the baby arrives.
After the baby arrives you’ll be deluged with baby clothes by friends and family; also rattles, toys, etc. you’ll have little need to buy yourself.
As for finding out the sex, very much a choice for the couple concerned. The medics will always ask whether you want to know. I don’t have any figures, but my impression is that most couples choose to be told, but quite a lot choose not to be told.
The opportunity to reliably know the sex is a fairly recent thing; back in the 90s when we had kids, there was one ultrasound appointment at around 18 to 20 weeks - at this stage, and with the prevailing level of technology, it was not always especially easy to discern the sex of the fetus and the priority focus of the examination was other things such as taking measurements of bones and checking the placenta etc to verify the current stage of pregnancy and check for obvious anomalies.
I remember being told by the ultrasound operator that it might be possible to determine the sex of the baby, but that it would not be 100% reliable, and being asked if we wanted to know; we chose to wait. In pregnancies that were assessed as ‘normal’, there would not necessarily be any further ultrasound appointment at a later stage.
There were other more reliable methods of determining the sex of the fetus such as amniocentesis, but since these carry a small risk of miscarriage, they were not routinely offered unless there was an actual medical reason to do so (that reason might have been the determination of sex, but only for medical reasons such as when there is some heritable problem that is sex-dependent).
So the opportunity was offered, but with the caveat that it might be wrong. We figured it was better not to know.
Looking around at my friends and work colleagues, I would say most choose to wait - I think it’s about adding to the excitement of the birth itself, as well as not wanting to ‘jinx’ things. But it wouldn’t be unusual for a couple to decide they want to know and - god forbid - have a gender reveal party. It’s entirely personal choice rather than any cultural expectation.
I also think people buy stuff in advance - you can’t just turn up at home with a baby and nowhere to put it.
I remember my grandmother telling me when I was little (must have been end '60s or the very early '70s) that the village doctor had found a way to determine the sex of a baby in the womb when this was medically impossible: he performed some complicated sounding tests, made some hokus pokus, consulted some dusty, thick books, and told the parents the result. (ETA: For a fee, of course) The village lore was that he told them one thing, but wrote the opposite in an official looking book. So, if he got it right, the parents would be happy, nobody would look at the book. But if he got it wrong, he could show the book and claim that the parents had obviously misunderstood what he said. The story sounds too apocryphal to be true, but at least it seems to indicate that some people wanted to know the sex of the unborn in rural Spain in ancient times.
Is that what they are called? I thought the sex could be determined in the gestated baby but the gender would show later in life.
Some do, some don’t. When you have the 20 week scan, they ask if you want to find out, and if you say yes the ultrasound technician attempts to look at the baby’s genitals - burger is a girl, hotdog is a boy. If you don’t want to know, sometimes they’ll tell you to close your eyes for part of the scan; they neglected to do this for some friends of mine who hadn’t wanted to know the sex, and according to them it was pretty obvious what they were having without being told.
Of the people I know who’ve recently had babies, I’d guess about half chose to find out before birth. One friend was so keen to know that she paid for a private scan when they weren’t able to tell her at the routine one (the baby wasn’t in a good position to see). I chose to find out, and then kind of regretted losing the surprise, so I probably wouldn’t again.
They do warn you that it isn’t guaranteed to be correct, and I got to see that for myself as I was on a maternity ward with a woman who was told she was having a girl, but it was actually a boy. She had bought gendered clothing and was busy trying to sell it off, and also trying to choose a name, since she’d only picked out one for a girl.
Yes, people in the UK buy things for the baby before it’s born. You need all that stuff to be ready when you bring the baby home; they won’t even let you leave hospital without showing them you have a car seat. I think it’s Israel where people avoid buying baby stuff, or at least avoid bringing it home before the baby’s born?
I just did some searching and it says that taking an ultrasound is very common in high-income countries. In Sweden, 97.6% of pregnant women have an ultrasound. In some countries, it’s actually illegal to have an ultrasound. These are lower-income countries where many married couples think that it’s important for them to have sons rather than daughters because having sons rather than daughters means that their their children will be able to support them better when they get old. For this reason, the government made it illegal to have an ultrasound because it was causing too many women to abort female babies. This would cause there to be many more male babies than female ones. It’s not a good idea for a country to have many more men than women (or, for that matter, many more women than men).
There was a short period in the late nineties when it was hard to find out the sex. There was a bullshit racist rumour that some ethnicities were having abortions if the scan revealed a girl. Not wishing to appear racist, the NHS ultrasound operators just refused to tell anyone, regardless of their race.
No data, just a personal anecdote. So it might just have been the guy who did our first scan, who made out he was doing us a favour by telling us. These days he would probably blame it all on ‘woke’.
It is. It’s so common that the system is set up for it - the infant retail chains will let you make all your purchases, and then hold them for months before they deliver them with 24 hours’ notice. I did that myself, at my parents’ insistence, which meant I spent part of the day after my son’s birth at home, building a crib.
I don’t know if it’s literal fear of the Evil Eye, or just fear of dramatic irony, but Jews are weird when it comes to pregnancy. Did you know you’re not supposed to say “Mazal tov” (congratulations) about someone who’s expecting? Because you can’t know whether it will be a good event or a bad one until the child is born, you’re supposed to say “Sheyihiye b’mazal” (may you have good fortune) instead.
As to the OP: I’ve never met an Israeli couple that didn’t want to know the sex of their baby. It’s hard to avoid the subject - prenatal medical care here is very comprehensive. My wife had at least 5 ultrasounds over the course of her perfectly normal pregnancy.