Married couples these days having their first baby are faced with choices that simply didn’t exist years ago. Once upon a time when a woman announced she was pregnant, everybody had an opinion as to whether the baby was a boy or a girl. Old wives tales abounded about how to tell the sex of the baby. They included dangling a coin over the pregnant woman’s tummy and seeing which way it moved. That was just one of the myriad old wives tales my extended family came up with. But then, they had an endless supply of old wives tales for every occasion.
Basically though, back then you could hope, wish or surmise all you liked, and some people always seemed to have a sense of what the baby was, but in the end it was really wait and see at the birth. These days parents are sent for more ultrasounds and tests that women were years ago. At some stage it will be possible for that to reveal the sex of the baby. Would you want to know?
Some people say, yes. It helps when buying clothes and things for the baby, for planning a nursery or deciding if bedrooms need to be re-arranged to accommodate a new baby. From a practical point of view it does make a lot of sense.
When our son and his wife were expecting, they were adamant they didn’t want to know, though my daughter-in-law admits she nearly gave in and changed her mind about that.
I rather liked the attitude of one young pregnant woman who, when asked that question replied, ‘No. You don’t open Christmas presents before the big day. It’s the same thing.’ In other words she liked the idea of surprise. Whether she and her husband will change their minds as the pregnancy progresses remains to be seen.
Even when people are told from the ultrasound the sex of then baby it’s not always right. Someone I know was told they were having a boy and it turned out to be a girl. So maybe science doesn’t always know everything.
Would you want to know the sex of your baby before it was born? Why or why not.
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