One of the biggest curiosities of parents in pregnancy is know if the baby will be a boy or a girl. Predictions about the sex of the baby before birth are common currency until it is confirmed by a medical test or an ultrasound, although sometimes they can also fail.
There are precise and other ways based on popular wisdom that have been passed from generation to generation. We will talk about scientific and non-scientific methods to predict the sex of the baby in pregnancy.
Non-scientific methods to predict the sex of the baby
With any of these methods we can have a good time predicting what the baby sex will be, but only as a game, since they have no scientific basis. They are simply probabilities, and they do not match, so as you can see the results they show are little (or nothing) reliable. You will tell us if it matches you or not.
- Chinese table: There is no scientific evidence on the effectiveness of the Chinese table to know the sex of the baby. It is based on the woman's age at the time of becoming pregnant (in the vertical columns) and in the month in which the baby is conceived (in the horizontal rows).
In Babies and more 11 signs that do NOT indicate if you expect a boy or a girlMayan table: Apparently, the Maya had their own prediction methods based on statistics that they themselves made. The Mayan table to know the sex of the baby also combines the age of the mother and the month in which she has become pregnant.
Moon's calendar: The lunar calendar to know the sex of the baby takes into account the date of the day of conception of the baby, but this is not easy to verify in all cases, especially if the woman has irregular cycles.
The shape of the belly: that if it is round it will be a girl and if it is pointed, boy, it is a myth. The shape and size of the gut do not predict the sex of the baby. This depends on other factors such as the physiognomy of the mother, the size and position of the baby inside the uterus, the implantation of the placenta, etc ...
Gypsy formula: The mother's age is added with the month in which she became pregnant. If it goes out evenly, it's a boy, if it comes out odd, girl
Mobile applications: With the new technologies, tools have already come out that supposedly predict the sex of the baby, but they are not reliable.
Cravings: cravings in pregnancy are also often related to the sex of the baby, but they are not true either.
Scientific methods to know the sex of the baby
Blood test: consists of extracting a sample of blood from the mother to analyze the fragments of non-cellular DNA in the plasma, from the fetus. As of the seventh week, the presence of these fragments in the mother's blood is sufficient to evaluate, in more than 95% of cases, whether the fetus is a carrier of the Y chromosome (with what would be a male) or not ( so it would be a woman).
Amniocentesis: It is an invasive test that involves the extraction of amniotic fluid with fetal cells. It is performed to detect congenital problems in the baby, such as Down, Edwards or Turner syndrome, among others, and also allows to know sex.
In Babies and more, boy or girl? Who determines the sex of the baby: chance, mother, father, God ...?Ultrasound: Ultrasound is the most commonly used method to know the sex of the baby. It is on the second ultrasound, around week 20 and depending on the position of the baby, that the baby's genitals can be seen more reliably to determine if it will be a boy or a girl.
Placenta Position: also known as the Ramzi method (name of the gynecologist who discovered it) is based on the position of the placenta with respect to the fetus to know the sex of the baby even from the first ultrasound. Ensures that it has a 97% reliability even if the genitals are not visible.
While it is very important for many future parents to know the sex of the baby as soon as possible, there are also those who choose to reach the birth without knowing the sex of the baby. It is a matter of preferences. But after all, the important thing is not that be it boy or girl but be welcome, loved and desired from the first moment
Photos | iStockPhoto
In Babies and more | How to predict the sex of the baby
