The sonogram screen flickers in the darkened examining room.
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At the Perinatal Center in Walnut Creek, Dr. Paula Melone peers at the screen closely, then turns to her patient, Angel Saravia, with a smile.
“Look,” Melone says in Spanish, moving the ultrasound transducer over Saravia’s rounded belly. “Here are the hands’ 10 fingers and here are the feet. Such big feet!
“And here,” Melone says, pointing with a finger, “are the testicles and the penis. Senora, you are having a boy.”
Ah, how the mysteries of life have vanished. It used to be that expectant couples waited eagerly for the birth of a child, not knowing whether they were having a son or a daughter.
With the increased use of sonograms or ultrasounds to monitor the growth of fetuses during routine pregnancies, couples often know the sex of their child long before the due date.
Yet many doctors say they are seeing a reversal of that trend. As the novelty of sonograms wears off, some couples are turning down their doctor’s offer to tell them whether they’re having a boy or a girl.
“That’s absolutely what’s happening,” said Mark Lollar, chief of obstetrics at San Ramon (Calif.) Regional Medical Center. He estimates more than half of his patients are choosing not to know.
“In the past, only women who were older and had amniocentesis could know the sex of their baby. Then when we started doing routine ultrasounds about seven years ago and the information was available to everyone, all the couples wanted to know.”
Sonograms, also known as ultrasounds, are images created by transmitting sound waves into the woman’s body. The transducer placed on her belly transmits the sound waves and receives them again to create an image on the screen. Gender usually can be determined around the 18th to 20th week of pregnancy.
Most health-care providers will pay for the cost of one sonogram, although couples may opt to have more. Lollar offers his patients three–one during the first trimester, one at the midpoint and one about a week before the baby’s due date.
Irene Beissner, a Benicia, Calif., obstetrician, estimated that about 90 percent of her patients want to know the sex of their child.
“It’s the practicality of the age,” she said. “They want to get the room ready and have the shower with the right gifts for a boy or a girl.”
But Charlah Robinson said about 40 percent of her patients at the Perinatal Center opt not to know. A recently as a year ago, only 5 percent preferred not knowing, she said.
Reasons vary for turning down the chance to know if it’s a boy or a girl.
Some prospective parents, such as Christine and Kevin Donohoe of Martinez, Calif., don’t care.
“All we knew was we wanted a happy, healthy baby,” said Christine, whose daughter, Isabelle, was born in August. “Our doctors tried to tell us, and asked us several times if we didn’t want to know, but we decided together that we didn’t care if it was a boy or a girl.”
The Donohoes weren’t alone in their decision. “Out of 15 couples in our Lamaze class, only two already knew if they were having boys or girls,” Christine said.
Others, such as Liz and David Walser, chose not to know because they weren’t ready to give the growing fetus an identity separate from its mother.
“Pregnancy is a really unique experience. It’s a time when the baby is a part of you,” said Liz Walser, mother to Lucas, 2, and Andrew, 5 months. “As soon as you assign a fetus a gender, it starts to have an identity separate from you. That will happen anyway as soon as the baby is born, so I take those nine months as a gift, a time when you are one with your baby.”
David Walser said he wasn’t as determined as his wife to keep the gender a secret at first, but they agreed to go along with Liz’s decision because “it’s her body.”
As each pregnancy developed, he found benefits in not knowing the sex of the child to come.
While the Walsers reached agreement, some couples are divided on the gender question, with one partner wanting to know the sex of the child and the other wanting to wait until its birth.
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When that happens, Lollar tells the couple to work it out. Occasionally, he will write the sex down on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope for the couple to take home.
“They can decide later whether they want to open it,” he said. “If they haven’t agreed, I don’t tell one partner and not the other.”
Anne and Kevin Bell have decided to hold off on knowing the sex of their triplets, although Kevin said, “I could have gone for a peek on this one.” The Bells have two children, Conor, 6, and Erin, 4.
“Everybody asks us if we’re having girls, boys or both,” Kevin said. “They think we’re kind of wacky because we don’t want to know.”