Not just another old wives' tale

I was searching online for the Bella Band which is a stretchy band of fabric that you wear around your belly during pregnancy. The band allows you to wear your regular clothes a bit longer and fit into maternity clothes a bit earlier. Genius, really. But this stretchy band of fabric sells for $28. So I was trying to figure out how to make a cheap duplication of this product with material I might have at home. The closest thing I could come up with involved the use of, you guessed it, duct tape. Which leads me back to my internet search that brought me to a page with an ad picturing a smiling woman holding a pregnancy test pee stick and the caption said, "Want to know the sex, too?" Well, yeah. I clicked and found the Baby Gender Mentor. With a few precious drops of blood, a stamp and $275 a pregnant women can now find out the sex of her baby as early as five weeks after conception! The website is full of testimonials from satisfied customers. Parents who used the kit express their gratitude for being able to begin their gender-specific baby shopping early. The test claims a 99.9% accuracy rate so I wasn't surprised not to find any comments from disgruntled parents who had to repaint the nursery after the baby came out the wrong sex. Curiously absent were those comments from parents who used the test for gender selection. "Thank you Baby Gender Mentor! You saved us a lot of grief and financial hardship. We were able to successfully terminate my first 3 pregnancies after the test results showed they were all boys. We finally have our precious baby girl to enjoy without the distraction of 3 rambunctious brothers." I wonder if the makers of this test are marketing to China?