For as long as couples have been having babies, couples have been trying to accurately predict whether they should invest in wallpaper with butterflies and flowers or airplanes and trucks. Today, medical science can give couples a fairly definitive answer about the baby’s gender by the second trimester.
Still, most couples want to try to at least guess at the baby’s gender before they know for sure. At worst, baby gender prediction methods have a 50/50 shot at being correct and they aren’t generally harmful to the expectant mother or the child.
Still, even medical professionals acknowledge that some baby gender prediction methods have more validity than others. Here are some of the gender prediction methods many doctors recognize as being at least reasonably accurate:
- Beats per minute. It’s said that if your baby’s heart rate is faster than 140 beats per minute, you’re having a girl. While medical professionals don’t acknowledge the number, they do acknowledge that baby girls’ heart rates are faster than baby boys’. Unfortunately, the difference isn’t really noticeable until the third trimester, well after you can know your baby’s gender much more accurately based on ultrasound imaging.
- Morning sickness throughout the day. Traditionally, it has been said that women who have morning sickness all day long are carrying a girl. Medical professionals acknowledge that women who are carrying girls are more likely to have severe or prolonged morning sickness due to higher levels of hCG, a pregnancy hormone which expectant mothers have at noticeably higher levels when carrying a girl.
Most medical professionals will tell you that other gender prediction methods, whether the Chinese gender prediction calendar, the Drano method, dangling a ring in front of your belly or some other method, are unfounded and have a roughly 50% chance of correctly predicting your baby’s gender.
As early as 18 weeks, your ultrasound can predict your baby’s gender with an accuracy of about 85%. That’s significantly better than any traditional method, including the ones which doctors recognize as having some degree of validity.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to predict your baby’s gender ahead of the ultrasound. By all means, if you have a traditional gender prediction method you believe in or enjoy, have a good time with it. Who knows? There could be something to it that medical science simply hasn’t figured out. At worst, you have a 50% chance of correctly predicting your baby’s gender.