‘Baby Gender Testing’ lets you find out the sex of your baby as soon as the seventh week of pregnancy. It uses a blood or urine sample from the mother and is totally non-invasive, meaning no samples are taken from the foetus or amniotic sac. It’s more accurate than ultrasound and can be done five weeks sooner.
Blood or urine?
Both types of sample are simple to collect. The testing provider will send you a container for the urine or a ‘finger prick tester’ for a drop of blood. If you know anyone with diabetes you may have seen a ‘finger prick tester’ device before.
How early can the test be done?
The blood test can be taken as early as the seventh week of pregnancy (nine weeks after the last menstruation) and the urine test can be taken as early as the ninth week of pregnancy. Make sure you know when the pregnancy started or the test might not work.
Are the tests accurate?
Yes. The blood test is 95% accurate and the urine test is 99% accurate. Finding out the sex of your baby via ultrasound requires you to wait until week twelve, and then only 90% of scans will give you an answer, and of those only three quarters are correct.
What else will the test tell me?
The test only tells you the sex of the baby – nothing else about any health or developmental issues.
Does it replace ultrasound scans?
No, it is important that you still have your ultrasound scans as they can detect things related to your baby’s health, things that a baby gender test won’t reveal.
Does it work for a multiple pregnancy?
Yes but with limited results. If you’re pregnant with more than one baby, the test can tell you if there’s at least one boy, or if they are all girls. It cannot tell you for certain if there’s one boy and one girl.
Keep away from men
The test is highly sensitive to male DNA as it’s looking for tiny amounts. Therefore, it’s recommended that the mother has no intimate contact or sex with a man for 72 hours before producing a sample, and that no male should touch the sample or packaging. One provider – ‘International Biosciences’ – even states that when the sample arrives at their lab, it’s only handled by women on the staff.
