You are here

Are You Having A Baby Boy Or A Baby Girl?

During the second half of my wife's first pregnancy, our mothers and aunts told us that we were definitely going to have a baby boy.

How did they know with such certainty?

Because Margaret gained the bulk of her pregnancy weight at the front of her abdomen.

According to widely accepted folklore, if weight gain during pregnancy occurs mainly at the front of the abdomen, one can expect a baby boy. If weight gain occurs more evenly throughout a woman's body and face, it's most likely a girl.

Do these beliefs stand up to scientific scrutiny?

According to a study conducted at Johns Hopkins University in 1999, the shape of a pregnant woman's abdomen is not a reliable predictor of a baby's gender. Researchers came to this conclusion by tracking the pregnancies of 104 women who did not know the sex of their babies.

Two unexpected findings were as follows:

  • Women with 12 or more years of formal education correctly predicted the gender of their babies approximately 70 percent of the time. Those with less formal education were right about the sex of their babies only 43 percent of the time.
  • Predictions that were based on dreams and feelings were more accurate than those based on each woman's pattern of weight gain.

Just as an aside, some of our readers may find it funny to know that Korean folklore says that dreams about snakes represent a baby boy, while dreams about any types of buttons or flowers equate to a baby girl.

In the end, as most of us believe, what matters most is that mother and baby are healthy.

To read dietary and lifestyle suggestions for women looking to experience a healthy pregnancy, view the following article:

The Latest Research On Premature Births

 
 

Join more than 80,000 readers worldwide who receive Dr. Ben Kim's free newsletter

Receive simple suggestions to measurably improve your health and mobility, plus alerts on specials and giveaways at our catalogue

Please Rate This

Your rating: None Average: 3.9 (22 votes)
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.
 
 
 

Comments

As a retired OB nursing instructor, with personal experience in GENDER PLANNING (as opposed to predicting), I read the blog with great interest - and a smile! Gender planning is SO very easy to do and much has been written about it in the past 35 years.

The most reliable clinical study and the one with the most successful results, was a 10 year study of 1000 couples, done between 1959 and 1969 under the direction of Dr. Landrum Shettles at Johns-Hopkins, in Baltimore, MD.... 1000 couples! No small sampling like some studies! That study had an 86.5% success rate in getting the gender that was PLANNED(on the basis of timing of intercourse, pH of vagina, sperm motility, and other factors).

I first heard of the study while working in Obstetrics in Elliot Lake in 1961. A fine obstetrician there, Dr. Maurice Farrell, told me about the study, shortly after I delivered the 22nd baby of one of his patients! It was her 16th girl ... and daddy wasn't happy! The doctor arrived as I was trying to explain to the father that his wife was NOT to blame for producing so many girls, and it was HIS donation to the pregnancy which determined the sex of the baby! :)Dr. Farrell told me about the Shettles study, then underway for 2 or 3 years.

Eight years later, I was privileged to be teaching obstetrical nursing in Detroit in late 1969, when the results of Dr. Shettles ten yr.study was presented at Grand Rounds! Subsequently, the following year, my new husband and I then PLANNED the gender of our two children, born in 1970 and '72... a boy and then a girl. Dr. Landrum Shettle's little book has been available to the public since 1973 and is still in print under the title "Choosing the Sex of Your Baby". If a couple has the intelligence and patience to carefully read and follow the very simple directives in planning to conceive either a male or a female baby, the outcome will be successful. As mentioned, the study had an 86.5% success rate! Those 13.5% who were UNsuccessful usually did not follow ALL instructions with exactitude. Many other conclusions came from this study, too numerous to recount here.

Also, Dr. Shettle's was later a pioneer in in vitro fertilization in the US, although his colleagues in England beat him to the first successful birth with the birth of Baby Louise Joy Brown in 1978. Baby Louise is now about to give birth herself sometime this month( wonder if she used gender planning or if they are predicting the gender by the shape of her belly!!!!!!!) Yes, the important thing is that baby is planned to be healthy!

I recently gave birth to a daughter and found your article interesting.

I did not gain weight in my face, all the weight was in my abdomen which was quite large. This occurred in both my pregnancies, one was a boy and the other a girl.

I did, however, dream of my daughter three times over the past couple of years prior to her conception. In fact, I met her in my dreams and had her name chosen before I'd even met her father.