OB Patients Come Prepared
From my experience performing OB scans, parents-to-be who want to know the gender of their baby outnumber those who don't. When my wife was pregnant neither of us gave it a second thought - we were going to know if we were having a boy or girl as soon as we could. That might sound logical coming from a sonographer but then again I'm surprised at the number of sonographers who choose not to know their baby's sex before birth. I've always found it interesting to hear the rationale "We want to be surprised." - as if a birth isn't a big enough surprise already.
My personal belief is that knowing if you are having a girl or boy before they are born allows you to prepare both mentally as well as materially (buying clothes, etc.) and it makes choosing a name a whole lot easier too. Thus, I completely understand why it ranks so high on patients' reasons to have an OB sonogram even if it isn't a "legitimate medical indication".
If you perform obstetrical sonograms, one thing is sure: you will frequently be asked by your patients to tell them if they are having a boy or a girl. Sometimes it's a loaded question in that if you tell them that you think it's a boy, but they are "carrying high" (or whatever other old wives' tale they believe in) or a fortune teller told them they are having a girl they might think you lack the necessary skills needed for gender determination. Likewise, if you tell a first-time dad that the baby he expects to grow up and become a NFL football player is a girl he'll insist it isn't so.
I had a funny experience once when assisting an amniocentesis on the wife of a very well-known pro baseball player. Of course, they wanted to know their baby's sex and when I told them it looked to me like it was a boy the husband got really excited. He let out a whoop, slapped me on the back and thanked me so much you would have thought that I had something to do with making the baby! When I performed early OB scans in a fertility office I would often get asked if I could tell the sex of a 7-week embryo (usually by the husband). After explaining the limitations of the scan, my reply to the couple - some of which had gone through many months of treatment - was "Does it matter?" That usually put things in perspective.
Suffice it to say, just like most of medicine, our patients often do some on-line research before they come for their examinations. They arrive for their OB sonograms prepared and know what we are looking for, like major structural defects and the size of the baby, and sometimes demand certain services even when they are not warranted (e.g., 3D / 4D scans).
Case-in-point: I recently found a site with a blog that described how patients can decipher the sonograms of their fetus to help them distinguish "boy parts" (referred to as turtle heads) from "girl parts" (called hamburgers). Oh - if only it was so easy...
Take a look for yourself here or at the link below in case your next OB patient sees a turtle head but you see a burger.
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-608-Early-Childhood-Parenting-Examiner~y2009m4d3-Boy-ultrasounds-and-girl-ultrasounds--whats-what-with-a-photo-slide-show
A new urine test was developed that claims to be 80% accurate in identifying the sex of a fetus - read about it here: http://cbs4.com/health/intelligender.unborn.baby.2.1125072.html