There’s good news for pregnant women who can’t wait nine months to find out their baby’s gender. During different stages of your pregnancy, you can perform a variety of tests to determine the gender of your baby. Let’s talk about a safe ultrasound test called a fetal ultrasound or baby sonogram.
What Is a Fetal Ultrasound?
During pregnancy, fetal ultrasounds are used to create an image of your baby in your uterus using sound waves. It is normal for your doctor to order an ultrasound during pregnancy to learn important information about your baby’s growth and development. Your doctor can also use it to check for any potential problems with your baby.
Ultrasounds at Different Stages of Pregnancy
- First Trimester: It helps to determine the size, location, and number of fetuses in pregnancy and how many weeks you’ve been pregnant
- Second Trimester: Next, a second-trimester ultrasound is performed (14 to 26 weeks) to assess how the baby is growing and developing. Further, twins can be determined during the second trimester
- Third Trimester: Another ultrasound can be ordered for the third trimester of pregnancy (27 to 40 weeks). As part of this examination, your doctor may want to find out if your baby is growing appropriately, what their position is, and how much weight they are expected to gain.
When Can You Use Ultrasound to Learn Baby’s Sex?
A routine ultrasound can be used to determine a baby’s gender during the first and second trimesters of pregnancy. Before the ultrasound, make sure you tell your ultrasound professional if you wish to know the gender of your baby, or if you would rather keep it a secret until the baby is born. The more you are pregnant, the more accurate the gender prediction becomes. At 11 weeks, accuracy varies from 70.3% to 98.7%, and at 12 weeks to 100%. By using a method known as the ‘nub theory’, sex can be determined by ultrasound as early as eleven weeks of gestation.
The Nub Theory
Baby’s legs have an informally known genital tubercle, known as a ‘nub’. Around 11 or 13 weeks, the nub starts to form. Traditionally, the nub indicates that if the angle between the nub and the spine is greater than 30 degrees, the baby is male.
An infant is female if the nub is parallel to the spine, or if the angle against the spine is less than 10 degrees. It was possible to identify the gender of 93% of the babies based on the nub theory when it was tested on 656 singleton pregnancies in a controlled study.
Accuracy of Results
In spite of the high accuracy rate from 12 weeks onward, an ultrasound isn’t 100% foolproof when it comes to identifying the sex of your baby. However, it’s a low-risk procedure with no side effects. Ultrasound does not have any side effects that could harm either the mother or the baby, so it is totally safe for the gender determination to be done without any complications.
If you use the right ultrasound machine and if it is done by a professional and by using the latest equipment, there will be very minimal side effects. Moreover, if you are also looking for the same opportunity, we would suggest having an appointment at the best ultrasound studio located at Springfield where the team of specialists not only make an ultrasound report, but also give you the proper guidance you need.
Yes we are talking about BabyEnvisions, one of the best baby sonogram studios in Springfield, Illinois USA.
