The U.S. marketplace is punctuated with products and services trying to lure desperate parents into believing that somehow, someway, it must be possible to predict and even select the outcome of the baby’s gender through various hocus pocus methods. Perhaps not coincidentally, many products and services, such as www.fortunebaby.com, appear to be subsidiaries of companies based in China and India where male babies are prized over baby girls.

In the line-up of such products, Baby Gender Mentor blood test hit the marketplace with great Public Relations fanfare including a brief interview on the Today Show and a headline in the Boston Globe. Sadly, both of these popular press outlets focused squarely on the debate about gender selection ethics and never seriously questioned the accuracy of such a test. As a result, millions of viewers and readers may have assumed the expensive test results were accurate. Acu-Gen charges $275 to mail order the test.

This was in June. Now, three months later, enough women who were lured into buying the test and assured by the company’s guarantee that it will reimburse misdiagnoses with 200% of their money back, are asserting the test doesn’t work. Many women are trying to get refunds and are being told by Acu-Gen that a “vanishing twin” may have caused the test to fail.

National Public Radio, taking a more critical stand, recently broadcasted a story pointing out that Acu-Gen offers little proof of its claims and admits that it is not required to undergo FDA testing to verify accuracy. On its web site, the company describes how the process purportedly works.

Gender-specific DNA from the fetus floats around in the mother’s blood stream after having crossed over the placental walls. The presence of the Y chromosome in the female blood via a finger-prick blood tests indicates a “male-positive” baby.

A visit to Acu-Gen’s Gender Mentor test web site reveals some other questionable assertions. Men are not allowed to be anywhere near the pregnant woman as she is having her blood drawn for the test. Acu-Gen also lists on its web site the names and publications of noted experts on fetal DNA testing, some whom NPR interviewed and deny any involvement with the company.

The notion that just five weeks into a pregnancy a simple blood test can accomplish what amniocentesis or ultrasound can do much later in a pregnancy is at this point wishful thinking. A dedicated web site: www.in-gender.com takes a more comprehensive and critical look at the claims of many sex-prediction and selection techniques and includes descriptions of the high-tech methods that do work.

– Eldon Schriock, MD

Tags: Genetic Testing, News

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Critical Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.