So my hubby read this article the other day on the Drudge Report. It was odd, because I swear when I was pregnant with the monkey I had googled how to find out my son’s sex early, and ran across something about blood tests as early as 8 weeks, so when he mentioned this to me just now, I started the google…and, what I found is like the article mentions it’s not really part of the US practice, but I found all these old studies from 2003… so then I googled if any clinics have it and here are two: offering Sexagem Fetal and Pro Clinco. And from a Brazilian blog it’s like R$380 so not cheap… or cheap depending on how your categorize Brazilian expenses.
From Dona-Barriga's blog
Which made me think, I have to friend one at 15 weeks and one at 24 weeks who just found out the sex of their babies. And the whole reason that they had to wait that long was because the US is worried that by allowing you to discover the sex of your baby early, people may get abortions.
Literally, I lay in bed last night thinking about this.
In the US where abortions are completely legal, and where fetuses are not considered to be alive until birth, finding out the sex of the fetus early (and there are real medical reasons why this would matter, not just what color the baby’s room will be painted), is not something that we Americans feel we should allow. How does that make sense?
But then I got to thinking, Brazil is a VERY religious country, are abortions in Brazil even legal?? And according to Wikipedia.. yeah, yeah I know it’s not the law.. they’re not really legal unless the mother’s life is in danger or it was rape. Per Wikipedia Brazilians don’t seem even close to wanting to legalize it.
A March 2007 Datafolha/Folha de S. Paulo poll found that 65% of Brazilians believe that their country’s current law “should not be modified”, 16% that it should be expanded “to allow abortion in other cases”, 10% that abortion should be “decriminalized”, and 5% were “not sure”
Which brings me back to my original thought. We all know even with abortions being illegal in Brazil they happen, so if the whole point of the US saying they don’t want people to find out the sex of the babies is because it could increase abortions, wouldn’t that same/similar logic apply to Brazil? I would think they don’t want people going out and getting illegal abortions.
Personally, I think people, even people who are okay with abortions, take issue with choosing to abort a baby if it’s one sex even if you would keep it if it were another. When you get into the waters of picking babies’ sex or other attributes, I guess you get into a whole different bucket of ethics as well. Thus why the US still hasn’t fully allowed this type of testing. Heck in China a test like this could have saved lives… or would have… back in the day… before there were tens of millions of single men.
Either way, this is one time where I’m going to have to say I like Brazil’s way of thinking about medicine better than the US’…but just one 😉
O Jeito Brasileiro 