Gender-reveal fad takes the cake

Partying around expectant mom to root for child’s sex criticized

LONDON — Britain has its friends in America to thank for delivering the latest fad doing the rounds: the gender reveal party.

If you haven’t yet received an invitation to one, then let me explain — these are celebrations at which friends and family gather around an expectant mother to find out the sex of her child, through the cutting of a cake that contains pink sponge for a girl and blue for a boy.

Typically, the parents will find out at the same time as everyone else in the room, having asked their sonographer to seal the news in an envelope, which they will then hand straight to a baker who can get to work on a gender-reveal cake.

Inevitably, there are elaborate colourcoded decorations. And, like at most other parties, hosts sometimes encourage a dress code: come in “team” colours, so you can root for a boy or a girl and even cast votes on the matter. Yes, really.

These parties make the baby shower — another American import in which mothers-to-be are “showered” with gifts ahead of their infant’s birth — look restrained. They make the people who live-tweet their pregnancies and upload their baby’s scan as their Facebook profile picture look positively private. But the gender-reveal party is just one of the many ways in which surely the most private of processes — making a baby — can now be made public.

Of course, it is wonderful when someone gets pregnant but it is also the most normal thing in the world. Does it really need to be celebrated with expensive parties? Do we all need to be there as the couple discover the sex of their first born?

As little as a decade ago, people got pregnant and had babies without making much of a fuss about it. Now, you can call up such companies as Windows to the Womb and, for a not insubstantial price, purchase 4D scans of your unborn child, in key ring, DVD and CD-ROM form.

But all this early celebration has met with some criticism. Cathy Warwick, head of the Royal College of Midwives, worries that it gives women false hopes — because, naturally, things can still go awry after that first 12-week scan.

“What happens if a woman is celebrating a normal-looking baby and then it is discovered further down the line that something is wrong?” said Warwick. “It’s a bit like being given lots of wedding presents and then suddenly being jilted.”

Warwick added that the purpose of a scan is to check for potential problems during pregnancy, and that to “use it as a consumer tool raises ethical questions.”

Shouldn’t the focus of pregnancy be the health of the baby, rather than a desire to show it off, before it has even been born?