When you’re pregnant, and your due date is a long way off, it can feel like your baby is simultaneously a part of your own self and a complete stranger. Any tiny piece of information you can glean, whether it’s that your baby really likes to kick, seems to react to fruit smoothies, has a preferred active time, or their sex, can feel like getting a tiny hint of who this new person is before you meet.
It’s no wonder that moms have been somewhat obsessed with predicting the gender of their babies since long, long before medical science started giving us advance peeks. It’s also no surprise that so many methods have arisen across virtually every human culture to make these predictions.
After all, even a completely random guess will be right about half of the time.
Can Psychics Predict Babies’ Gender?
Individual experience may vary, but to date, there’s no empirical evidence for psychic phenomena. That doesn’t mean anyone’s personal experience is invalid, but psychic predictions of your babies’ sex or other characteristics just aren’t endorsed by science.
That said, in pregnancy, individual experiences mean a lot. That’s why one woman (who has chosen to only be identified as “Sam”) has caught Good Morning America‘s attention with her story. She was struggling with infertility and a recent loss when she decided to speak to a psychic medium.
“In that January 2018 reading, a psychic medium told Sam that she saw an older woman with a young boy. The older woman, who was crocheting a blanket, told the medium that Sam and her husband would not give birth to a male child, but they would welcome a baby girl when they found “the blanket.””
Sam’s late grandma had always crocheted a blanket for each new baby in the family. During a subsequent visit, Sam let her grandfather know that she was pregnant, despite early complications that made her unsure whether she would make it to term. Unfortunately, her grandfather passed away the next day, and as the family was cleaning out bins in his home, they found a pink crocheted blanket, as though Sam’s grandma had left it behind for her.
And yes, she had a successful pregnancy and gave birth to a baby girl.
Strings, Fetal Position, Dreams, & More
There are claims that one can predict the sex of a baby based on factors around the conception (which seem to rely on beliefs about which sperm are faster/stronger; current medical science does not support this), or by the position of the baby during pregnancy.
Women who are “carrying low” might be presumed to be having a boy, and those “carrying high” to be expecting a girl, although in truth, the baby’s position has a lot more to do with the mom’s body type and muscle tone. There’s no real reason, though, that a baby’s gender would affect how the uterus is positioned, or how the baby is positioned in it.
Then there’s the ring test. In this method, the pregnant person lies down on her back, while another person holds a chain with an item on the end (usually her wedding ring, but it could be another object). The belief is that if the ring moves back and forth, the baby is a boy, and if it moves in a circular motion, it’s a girl.
Dreams, hunches, or “just feeling like” the baby is a specific gender are also pretty common. One study, published in the Journal of Patient-Centered Research & Reviews, found that women who said they had an intuition about their baby’s gender were right about 51% of the time — entirely consistent with chance. Women who expressed a “strong degree” of intuition were right a bit more frequently: 62%, but still not enough to be considered statistically significant in the small sample size.
What About Medical Science?
One common way that parents have attempted to know the sex of their baby before birth has been by measuring the fetal heart rate. Your obstetrician may mention this number during a routine exam, and today, many moms buy a fetal doppler to use at home.
The prevailing wisdom has been that girls have a faster heart rate. That said, despite relying on medical data, a 2015 study published in the Journal of Maternal & Fetal Neonatal Medicine found no definitive difference in heart rate between male and female fetuses (though they found that males were slightly heavier). That research team noted that at least one study has found a correlation, but with a very small sample size.
Ultrasounds, of course, are the most common current tool for pre-guessing the sex of an unborn baby. They’ve only gotten more accurate over time, but it’s still possible to encounter an uncooperative fetus who won’t let the tech get a peek, and a prediction can still be wrong due to positioning or other factors.
Then there’s DNA. During my last pregnancy, I was given a fetal DNA screening thanks to my status as a high-risk patient. These are also available as opt-ins, though insurance may not cover them if they’re not deemed medically necessary. I was standing in a thrift shop looking at baby clothes when my doctor’s office called and said, “The DNA screening is good, none of the conditions we were worried about are showing up. Do you want to know what you’re having?”
These tests can occasionally be wrong, too, due to rare DNA variants, but they’re considered more than 99% accurate.
Is It Important To Know Your Child’s Sex Before Birth?
Some parents do not want to know their child’s sex before birth. Others are desperate for any detail they can glean about their little stranger. Parents will also differ on how much the baby’s sex really means about their identity.
Some parents build big dreams on setting up their nurseries in specific ways, and a part of that is often gendered color schemes. Others consider this kind of gendering inherently harmful, even before the baby is old enough to have any preferences of their own.
For others, it’s a factor in choosing a name. Are we naming the baby after mom’s favorite uncle or dad’s nicest aunt? Or maybe grandma likes to knit booties and crochet blankets in the ‘right’ colors.
Ultimately, the decision to predict a baby’s gender is a personal choice for each family, but if you do want to know, just remember that some prediction methods are far more reliable than others.
