A few months ago, when I was bursting at the seams with my fourth child, I ran into my neighbor on the elevator.

“Any day now,” she sing-songed. I nodded, eager myself to count down the days that I would be lugging around 35 extra pounds.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her.

“You mean you haven’t found out?” she gasped at me.

“No, we like the surprise,” I said.

I could tell that my neighbor had newfound respect for me. To many mothers of my generation, who are used to sonograms at five, eight, and 20 weeks into the pregnancy, it almost seems unnatural not to know the sex of your child.

According to most estimates, somewhere between 50% and 70% of all expectant parents find out the sex of their child before the birth, through the 20-week ultrasound, chorionic villus sampling, or amniotic fluid sampling.

Now there’s a new way to find out the sex as early as five weeks after conception, however. The Baby Gender Mentor Home DNA Gender Testing Kit bills itself as a scientific, noninvasive way to predict your baby’s gender, with 99.9% accuracy. It can be ordered online, costs $275, and delivers results in less than 48 hours. The product was launched June 13, and already thousands of units have sold.

Here’s how it works: The mother pricks her finger, and with a few drops of her blood, a laboratory is able to trace the amount of Y chromosomal DNA in her blood. Since the baby releases its DNA into the mother’s blood plasma, the only way to distinguish baby DNA from maternal DNA is if the baby is a boy and has a Y chromosome. If the Y chromosome DNA is present in the maternal blood sample, it’s a boy; if it’s not, it’s a girl.

Seems simple enough, although the test doesn’t change the basic decision that parents face: to find out the gender or to wait.

“I understand many reasons not to find out before the baby is born, but I don’t understand the surprise argument,” said a mother of two, addressing the response I often give as to why my husband and I chose not to find out the sex of the baby. “If you find out when you’re five months pregnant, it’s a surprise at five months. I guess now the surprise is at five weeks. I loved knowing the sex of the baby while I was pregnant. We got to choose the name, buy the right clothes, and get used to the idea that we were having a boy. For me, I think the greater question is ‘Why not find out?'”

Many parents who choose to know the sex of the baby in advance point to the ability to bond with the baby more easily. “Once I knew the baby was a girl, I could picture her in our family, think of what she might look like and act like,” one father said.

But for my husband, it seemed too risky to think along these lines before the birth. “What if something goes wrong? If you find out the sex of the baby and have the name picked out, you do begin to become more attached. But I’m not so sure that’s such a good thing when you haven’t even given birth. It would make it that much harder for me if something were to go wrong,” he said.

Many men I spoke to agreed with my husband, although many women I spoke to felt that, regardless of whether or not they knew the sex of the baby, they would be devastated if something were to go wrong. “For me, it has nothing to do with knowing the baby’s sex. I can’t help but feel connected to the baby when I’m pregnant. It is, after all, growing inside of me,” said the mother of two.

Plenty of parents find out the gender of their unborn babies and then keep it to themselves. With the five-week test, however, that could mean keeping a secret for almost nine months. “We wanted to keep the whole thing a secret, but eventually we told people the sex but not the name,” one mother said.

The real question on everyone’s mind though when discussing this new test is whether or not the Baby Gender Mentor will lead to an increase in the number of abortions performed in this country. Plenty of parents have intense preferences about the sex of their unborn children. In fact, many parents go to great lengths to attempt to conceive a particular sex. What if these parents find out five weeks into the pregnancy that they are carrying the opposite of their chosen sex?

If the orphanages in China say anything about human nature’s response to having a baby girl when you really want a boy, or vice versa, then the debut of this test could certainly have troubling repercussions. Let’s just hope that in a few generations from now, we don’t sound so old-fashioned when we bump into expectant parents who have decided to let nature take its course.