Is It A Boy Or Girl?

That is usually the first question you hear when a baby is born, what do parents say when it is neither?

That is the dilemma new parents face when a baby is born with ambiguous genital. There is tons of pressure against the new born parents to say we don’t know.

How Hospitals Respond When It’s Uncertain If the Newborn Is a Boy or a Girl
In differences of sex development, hospitals vary widely in terms of treatment and guidance ahead of irreversible procedures, a new study shows.
University of Michigan Health Labs
By Beata Mostafavi
October 18, 2017

Mike and Julie were eagerly counting down the days until they’d get to meet their baby girl, Emma. But hours after her birth, their joy turned to worry. Doctors had made a discovery that shocked them: Their newborn daughter had what appeared to be testes.

The next 24 hours were a blur as Emma underwent several tests, and her parents were told that for unexplained reasons, she was born with XY chromosomes.

“They told us ‘you don’t need to raise your baby as male or female. You can be gender neutral for the first year,’” Julie remembers. “It blew our mind. Maybe in a perfect world we could, but this isn’t a perfect world and society doesn’t allow you to raise a nongender child. How could we ever choose a gender for our child? My heart was just broken for her imagining how hard her life would be.”

“At the time, we were just so uneducated about this topic. We felt extremely alone and isolated.”

About 1 in 1,500 babies are born with a disorder, or difference, of sex development (referred to by some outside the medical community as intersex), in which development of the sex chromosomes, gonads or sex anatomy is atypical.

Some hospitals are doing something to help the parents understand about DSD while other hospitals turn to surgery to “correct the mistake.”

In fact, there’s significant difference in how institutions across the country respond to such cases — having a major impact on a family’s experience and decisions about sometimes irreversible procedures, according to a new study led by members of the DSD team at University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.

“A family’s experience and potential care for these conditions may be drastically different depending on where their child is born,” says senior author David Sandberg, Ph.D., a pediatric psychologist at Mott. “We found substantial variability across health care institutions in the ways that they organized and delivered care for these patients and families as well as how families were counseled prior to genital or reproductive anatomy surgery.”

Now more and more healthcare providers are saying wait. Wait until the child is old enough to make an informed decision. While other healthcare providers stand there with scalpel in hand saying they know what is best for the baby.

It is time to step away from surgical intervention model to an informed consent model where the patients get to decide what is best for them.