ultrasound

We're excited to share this post from our partners at BabyCenter! Every week, we will be bringing you the best parenting and lifestyle stories from the experts at BabyCenter, including this post from Katherine Martin about elective ultrasounds.

Remember when you were little and you used to say, “But Mom, everyone else is . . . ,” and she would respond, “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?” I feel like that right now. I feel like “everyone” is paying for elective gender-revealing ultrasounds and I can’t help feeling “but everyone else is . . . ”

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This is my fourth baby. I remember some people paying for elective ultrasounds when I was pregnant with my second and third, but anecdotally it feels like there is a huge increase now. My August 2012 Birth Club is filled with elective ultrasound gender-reveal results. And I’m having a hard time resisting getting one.

My reasons to resist:

1. I like how finding out the sex of the baby at 20 weeks divides the pregnancy into two parts. I feel like if I found out the sex at 16 weeks, the rest of the pregnancy would just drag on and on.
2. Money! Elective ultrasound aren’t cheap: $100 seems like a lot when I could just be patient for a few more weeks.
3. Guilt. What is wrong with me that getting an elective ultrasound makes me feel guilty just thinking about it? There’s a part of me that feels like it’s cheating. I realize that makes no sense, but that’s how I feel.

It’s hard to wait. Especially reading how happy some members are with their elective ultrasounds.

But I’m waiting. The clock is ticking down, and I now have less than two weeks until I have my 20-week ultrasound. And I do know it’s about way more than gender. In fact, I know that finding out the sex is just a small part of the ultrasound, and the purpose is determining the health of the baby. But still, I’m excited to know if my three boys will get a brother or a sister.

Did you get an elective ultrasound to find out the sex of your baby? Was it worth it? Or did you wait until the 20-week ultrasound?

More great reads from BabyCenter:
Do you follow the 24-hour rule?
Ten creative, healthy ways to feed your kids
Does dangerous baby yoga upset you?
Seven things for baby you can make yourself
A happy, hip girls room in orange and blue

Source: Flickr User Stephen Cummings

What the fetus! For many expectant parents, routine ultrasounds are one of the things looked forward to most throughout the pregnancy process, offering an incredible glimpse at the eagerly anticipated bundle of joy within. The last couple of years have seen an increase in both the use and popularity of 4D ultrasounds, which provide an almost eerily realistic image of the baby-to-be.

Though parents are understandably delighted by these scans — OMG he has your nose! — creating one more photographic keepsake is not their intended use, which is to monitor the baby's development and ensure that everything looks good medically. Yet the use of these scans has taken a quick departure from their medical origins, with "fetus parties" — where parents-to-be invite friends and family to gaze upon the 3D and 4D scans — becoming more and more commonplace.

While everyone can appreciate why expectant parents are so excited to show off and share these lifelike images of their unborn baby with family and friends, not everyone in the medical community thinks it's such a great idea. In a column for the BBC, Professor Cathy Warwick, chief executive at The Royal College of Midwives, discusses her concern about the growing popularity of "fetus parties": "I think the worrying trend towards the commercialization of pregnancy and trend in 'fetus parties' can add to the burden, and can increase the expectation for mothers, which midwives then have to deal with.”

Did you have a fetus party?

Smartphones can do just about anything these days, including conducting a sonogram on an expectant mama! A Redmond, Washington-based company just received FDA approval to sell the world's first phone-based ultrasound system.

The MobiUS, which will be sold commercially to medical professionals, uses a Toshiba Windows Mobile-powered smartphone, the company's software, and an attached probe to conduct ultrasounds. The phone's cellular network and Wi-Fi capabilities then allow doctors to send the images to others, including family and friends. The company behind the phone hopes it will help provide medical care to pregnant women in remote areas.

Though ultrasound machines cannot be sold for personal use due to the "Tom Cruise law," I imagine it will only be a matter of time before parents try to buy a MobiUS!