Culture of Pregnancy in Thailand?

February 17, 2009 2:38 AM

How long before you can tell the sex of an unborn child? Culture of pregnancy in Thailand?

I've got a mate (this really is a mate - not me!) who was having/has a LDR with a woman in Thailand.

She recently told him that she was pregnant with his child. It was going to be a girl.

She then, against my friends wishes and despite his offers of support, opted for an abortion for which my friend sent the money.

I've been doing some googling and I am seeing reports of the earliest a sex can be determined as 15 weeks so more than 2 and a half months.

I'm a little bit concerned that my friend has been taken for a ride. I believe he paid 150 pounds for the abortion - which is neither here of there - but if my worst suspicions are true then it is a very cruel trick to play on someone who wants a child.

However maybe I misunderstand the science of determining baby sex or maybe some other local, traditional way of doing it. My friend says the girl is from a good, rich family. He is suprised that she was even interested in someone like him (he is a lawyer in the West) and believes her totally.

posted by aTrumpetandaDream to health & fitness (10 comments total)

Just to be clear she told him about the child and had an abortion at 2 and a half months. So unsure as whether the sex can be determined by then.
posted by aTrumpetandaDream at 2:39 AM on February 17

A few things:

1) The date of the pregnancy is often reported by convention as the weeks from the last menstrual period. It might be the case that she is referring to the weeks since the estimated date of conception whick differs by about 2 weeks.

2) I've heard of ultrasonographers determining gender as early as 10-11 weeks. The accuracy of such a determination is reduced, the sooner it is made. Typically between 15-20 weeks is when things really start to look clear, but even then it's not perfect.

3) There are more invasive ways to get information including gender that may be performed this early in pregnancy (chorionic villus sampling).

Consequently while maybe a bit fishy, I wouldn't say it's impossible that she knew or thought she knew the gender by around or a bit after 10 weeks. Alternatively, there are a whole host of non-Western medical approaches to this based on folk lore and such, so really anything is on the table.
posted by drpynchon at 4:00 AM on February 17

We found out that my son was a boy at an 11 week ultrasound. He flipped around with legs spread and we happened to get a perfect view. Before that, I had been investigating a blood test that you can take as early as seven weeks . It looks for traces of male DNA in the mom's blood. If it finds it (and you've never had or miscarried a male child before) then you are having a boy. No male DNA, a girl is coming. I never did try it out, I found some good and mixed opinions about it but when we knew the sex at 11 weeks, I didn't need it.
posted by pearlybob at 6:30 AM on February 17

Given that this story is third hand, it's questionable whether she knew it was definitely a girl, or she thought it was a girl. There are about nineteen thousand ways to determine the sex of a baby before it's born. And by "determine the sex of a baby" I mean, "do stupid shit and then make a wild guess". But lots of people put stock in those superstitions and old wives' tales.

Other people have spoken to the actual medical ways of doing the determination and the timing of those.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:02 AM on February 17

A couple of things come to mind. There are some Asian counties where determining the sex of your fetus is a huge industry and they do use blood tests to do so. It has nothing to do with local, traditional ways. In India for example, among certain income groups it is quite routine to abort female fetuses until you become pregnant with a male child, or to selectively abort your way to your ideal family. I have no opinion on this, I mention it to show that my personal anecdotal expereince is with India, specifically Southern India. A friend who is a neurologist did so and through her I became aware of how big it is right across Asia. I began to read some articles about selective abortion and it appears to be widespread across middle to high income groups in many nations, Asian countires included.

If she is from a wealthy family I have no doubt at the initial work-up she may have been offered this option, indeed, who knows, it may have been important in her decision to abort. Unless your friend talks to her he will not know. Again no matter how wealthy or westernised her family might be, there is still a social stigma to being a single parent. Again from experience with friends in Pakistan and abortion was vital to at least 2 of them to maintain their marraige prospects.

So I realise from your post that you feel sorry for your friend and want to be supportive during this time as he has had a loss. But it may not be useful to ascribe negative motivation to the decision to abort.
posted by Wilder at 7:17 AM on February 17

Oh, and you can generally determine the sex once the abortion is carried out.
posted by Wilder at 7:18 AM on February 17

In fact it turns out that Thailand is one of the leading centres for fetal testing research,
see here.
posted by Wilder at 7:24 AM on February 17

from a Thai private hospital that advertises widely in Japan and the UK. Their interestingly named Perfect Woman institue offers the following at 10-13 weeks

There are a variety of other invasive and non-invasive techniques available for prenatal diagnosis and prenatal testing. Each can be applied only at specific time periods during the pregnancy for best results. The techniques employed for prenatal diagnosis include:

Highly precise 4D ultrasound
Chorionic villus sampling a.k.a. CVS (invasive biopsy placental cell test during 10-13th week of pregnancy to detect genetic diseases) .....

Medical Tourism is a huge growth area in Thailand and hundreds of UK women travel there annually for medical procedures, plastic and otherwise. Some private centres are on a par with comparable hospitals in the West.

I'm just saying it seems as if she would have had the possibility of knowing the sex of the foetus before an abortion. (now I'd better get back to work!)
posted by Wilder at 7:35 AM on February 17

The gender detail bothers me, not on technical grounds but on behavioral reality. Why would she bother to go through (whatever means) to determine the sex of the fetus if she planned to have an abortion anyway? Moreover, she hadn't even made it out of the first trimester, so the abortion should have been straightforward. Could it be that she intended to continue the pregnancy if the fetus turned out to be male? If so, then I wonder what support your friend would have been asked to provide?
posted by carmicha at 8:52 AM on February 17

camicha, she may believe he will be less upset that she aborted a girl as opposed to a boy. In any case I think it was just a piece of information given at the initial work-up in light of her circumstances.

Or if he ever waxed lyrical about having a little girl of his own one day she may actually be trying to hurt him. It's impossible to tell.
posted by Wilder at 5:32 AM on February 18