TRANSCRIPT
Now, I would guess that you would want to know something about baby anatomy. So let’s look at baby anatomy a little. We’ll look at things like the arms and the legs and we’ll look at the belly, the stomach, the lungs, we’ll look at feet, we’ll look at the heart — the four chambers of the heart. I don’t know if you can see that one, there? Four chambers of the heart, right there. We’ve got parts of the baby’s brain here. We’ll look at that. We’ll look at the cord insertion, that’s where the cord goes into the belly there. Again, that’s the future belly button site. These bright colors are blood flow in the umbilical cord around the bladder. Then you can see these bones; that’s the spine all along there. So we’ll look at those main parts of the anatomy. That’s the thing that we’re looking at. Now what are you hoping for?
Hoping for a … I’d like to have a boy. Oh. So you want to know something else. Is anybody interested in finding out about gender? Sure. Well, take a look at these pictures. Can you tell? Yeah. Can you see what they are? Uh-huh. There’s the boy part and there’s the girl parts up there. So if you want to know about the gender, if the ultrasound techs can see, they’ll probably tell you. Now, sometimes trying to convince that dad that it’s really a girl instead of a boy, like he might want, or finding it, you know, might take awhile. So, if it takes too long, then they sometimes can’t tell you, but we’ll tell you if we can tell you and see.
So can ultrasound tell us if the baby’s chromosomes are normal? Do you think? Probably not. It can’t. You’re exactly right. It can’t really tell you. It can help determine if there’s a higher or lower the risk, depending on what we see. And depending on things like who is doing the ultrasound, what kind of equipment we have. Also, how old the baby is and mom’s shape and size … all those kinds of things influence how well ultrasound can help us determine whether or not the baby looks normal, and then determine again the risk for things like chromosome problems and so forth.