Yet another gender reveal turned tragic when a small plane announcing the gender of a baby in Mexico crashed. After the plane released a pink substance to announce an unknown couple’s baby’s gender, it dropped into the ocean, shown in a video of the event. This accident occurred a little more than a month after a dad-to-be died after a device for his own child’s gender reveal exploded.
Media in Cancun confirmed that two people died after the plane crashed into the ocean. A video of the event shows the plane flying over the ocean with people in the background shouting in excitement, then horror.
“As long as it doesn’t fall on us,” someone says in the video.
“Here it comes,” someone else adds.
“It’s a boy,” a man says.
“It’s a girl,” a woman says.
The shouting turns darker.
“That’s crazy!”
“It went into the water!”
This isn’t even the first time that a small plane used for a gender reveal has crashed. In Texas, a plane that dropped 350 gallons of pink water for a gender reveal stalled and crashed upside down into a field in 2019. The pilot was unharmed but a passenger was injured.
The fatal plane crash is the latest deadly gender reveal stunt. In February, a 28-year-old New York man was building a device for his child’s gender reveal party when it exploded, killing him and injuring his brother. Earlier that month, a baby shower became tragic when a small cannon blew up and killed a Michigan man. In 2019, debris from a gender reveal explosion struck and killed an Iowa woman. And just a year earlier a gender reveal smoke bomb in Tucson, Arizona caused a fire that led to more than $8 million in damages.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission shared a public service announcement on Twitter that urged people to “choose cake” instead of “improvised explosive devices.”
“Don’t turn a party into a family tragedy. Get a cake. Leave fireworks, smoke bombs, or other explosive devices to the professionals,” the Tweet said.
Even the woman credited with started gender reveal parties has expressed remorse. In 2008, Jenna Karvunidis celebrated finding out the gender of her oldest child with a duck cake that had a filling that matched the baby’s gender. In this case, it was pink. Karvunidis never suspected that her modest party would be the start over-the-top celebrations in the pursuit of uncovering a baby's gender.
“I had absolutely no thoughts in 2008 of the greater implications of gender reveal parties,” she told TODAY Parents in 2019.
She shared her story on her blog and parenting forums that year. The Bump magazine interviewed her and credited her the celebrations.
"Gender reveal parties are canceled," she said. "I cringe when I see them now. The insane levels people are taking them just to celebrate one of the most mundane facts about their child is just bizarre."
While she worried about the damage and tragedy that many elaborate parties cause, she also feels concerned that a focus on one detail about a child is limiting.
“Who cares what gender the baby is?” she wrote on her blog’s Facebook page. “ "I did at the time, because we didn't live in 2019 and didn't know what we know now — that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what's between their legs."
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