Fetal Sex prediction at 7 weeks

So, The New York Times came out with an article today that discusses a new finding in a study from The Journal of the American Medical Association about fetal sex prediction at 7 weeks.

The objective of the study was:

To document overall test performance of noninvasive fetal sex determination using cell-free fetal DNA and to identify variables that affect performance.

I thought this was interesting because I will admit walking past those sex prediction kits at the pharmacy thinking... should I? Of course those home kits analyze your urine not blood and the results are not accurate.  But according to this study the blood tests (if administered properly) had a pretty high level of accuracy, especially when testing after 20 weeks.

The test as you might have guessed, aims to detect the male "Y" chromosome in the mother's blood.

And... let's go back to basic biology for a minute and remember that, the sex of a baby is determined by the two sex chromosomes inherited from the parents. Normally, a baby will inherit one sex chromosome from the father and one from the mother. Women have two X chromosomes, so she can give either of her X chromosomes. Men have an X and Y so a father can give either his X or Y chromosome.

There's a pretty picture I found on a grammar school website.

Ok now that we're caught up, back to the study.  It basically states that with a blood test it is possible to determine gender as early as 7 weeks gestation at about a 95% success rate.  For most of us this may offer a nice way of finding out the sex of our child very early on before the traditional 20 week "sex" ultrasound.  But the bigger concern is that there will be those who use the test as a sex selection tool, ultimately aborting the unwanted fetuses.

Aside from the moral problems with this early testing, there also come the potential lawsuits against manufacturers of these products for the wrong results.  Such as the lawsuit against Acu-Gen in 2006 where claimants sued Acu-Gen when they were not provided with a refund upon finding out the results were incorrect.  A settlement was reached, and then Acu-gen filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

Blumer, et al. v. Acu-Gen Biolab, Inc., et al., No. 06-CA-10359-RCL (D. Mass. Mar. 28, 2006)


That's as far as I followed the case, but this type of lawsuit reminds me of the intriguing albeit controversial "wrongful birth/life" lawsuits discussed in one my law school seminars.  Yes, these are malpractice cases where parents have sued medical providers and hospitals claiming that had they known their child was going to be as severely disabled as they are, they would have aborted the child.  Essentially the parents in these cases are alleging that the child would have been "better off dead".  Pretty harsh right? Well, consider the types of severe disabilities that some of these children that were the subject of these lawsuits have had:

-one child had severe retardation, was unable to walk, can only say a few words, is legally blind and has to often be hospitalized.

-another child born with a hole in his diaphragm that resulted in his stomach being located in his chest cavity resulting in liver and kidney failure

-but then another, with spina bifida, paralyzed from the waist down, but mentally normal

The first two cases settled for over a $1 mil each. 

link to CBS new article with more details about wrongful birth cases

While these wrongful birth lawsuits are rare, the legal argument is that the medical negligence caused by the doctor or hospital prevents the parents from making a truly informed decision about whether or not to have the child.