Initial Media Attention
The test was featured on an episode of The Today Show in June 2005. In that show, Katie Couric interviewed a woman named Holly Osburn who was mother to two daughters and expecting a third child. Also interviewed was Sherry Bonelli, the CEO of PregnancyStore.com, an Illinois-based on-line retailer where Osburn purchased her test. Bonelli said that the test had only been available for two weeks and that numerous people had inquired about it in that short time. She also said that Acu-Gen had followed 2,000 pregnancies through to completion and that the lab results given by the Baby Gender Mentor had never been wrong in those trials. She did not mention how these 2,000 pregnancies are related to the 20,000 pregnancies mentioned separately by Acu-Gen.
Osburn said that she wanted to know the sex of her baby because her house was filled with "pink and purples and lots of green" and she wanted to know whether to paint the nursery blue. She had agreed to have her test results announced to her on the show, and Bonelli informed her that she was going to have a girl, according to the results of the test.
In The Today Show segment, Couric also interviewed Dr. Ronald Wapner, head of maternal fetal medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital, who discussed possible pros and cons of the test. His first concern was whether the stated accuracy rate achieved in the 2,000 test cases would be realized in real world usage. His second concern was whether couples who purchase the test might use the results for family balancing, which means the decision to utilize selective abortion to achieve a baby of the desired sex. Wapner said that one positive aspect of the Baby Gender Mentor test is the non-invasive nature of the test, which means there should be no risk of harm to the fetus.
The test was listed as one of the top 10 innovations of 2005 by research company DataMonitor. In their report, titled Build A Better Mousetrap, Datamonitor identifies their picks for "the best new food, drink, health, household and pet products of 2005". They listed the test as the number 8 innovation of the year.
Read more about this topic: Baby Gender Mentor
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