An expectant mom was left “on the verge of tears” after her doctor revealed the gender of her unborn baby against her wishes.
It’s difficult to know the proportion of expectant moms and dads choosing to keep the sex of their baby a surprise. In an interview with Today, Dr. Laura Cha, a New York City-based OB/GYN, claimed that around 10 to 20 percent of her patients do so.
Whatever the figure may be nationwide, the fact of the matter is it’s entirely down to personal choice. What everyone can agree on is that it’s also a choice that should be respected.
Yet for Al Sheahan, a pregnant woman living in Melbourne, Australia, it’s one that was largely ignored or mistakenly overlooked by her doctor. Sheahan opened up about her experience in a video posted to TikTok under the handle alsheahan.
Sheahan, who is due to give birth in July, told Newsweek she created the video because she “just wanted to vent” and “couldn’t believe it had happened.”
It all came about during a phone call in which Sheahan was supposed to be getting the results for her NIPT test, a standard blood test designed to check for chromosomal abnormalities in a fetus.
In the video, Sheahan says that at the start of the call with her doctor, she told him, “I do not want to know the gender, please do not tell me the gender.”
However, the doctor seemingly missed this request and began to tell her what the fetal sex was. Sheahan recalls shouting, “No, no, no! I don’t want to know the gender!” In response, the doctor replied, “Oh, you don’t want to know” before swiftly moving on.
“He just continued on with the rest of the results,” she said. “We both just pretended it didn’t happen.” Try as she might though, Sheahan just couldn’t get what she had heard out of her head.
While the good news was that the NIPT test came back with results indicating there was a low risk for chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus, the call informing her of this had managed to derail one of the main things Sheahan had wanted from this pregnancy: for the gender to be a surprise.
In the video, Sheahan did not shy away from the fact she was “on the verge of tears” over what had happened and “so sad” that the surprise had been taken away from her.
“I think I was just in shock because I’d just asked him not to tell me,” she said. Despite having her own plans derailed, Sheehan said she intends to keep what she heard a secret from her husband.
“I think I’m lucky that I didn’t have a gender preference so it’s a bit easier to keep it a secret for the next six months,” she said. “But it’s still disappointing that the doctor took that moment away from me.”
Though she knows the main thing in this situation is that the baby is happy and healthy, she’s urging others who might want to keep it a secret to avoid taking the same route she did.
“Maybe don’t get your results over the phone,” Sheahan said, “just so that you can be really clear in person that you don’t want to know and hopefully the doctor listens and honors that.”
TikTok/@alsheahan
