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Home › Articles › Preparing for Baby › Gender Guessing

Gender Guessing

Myths for Predicting a Baby's Sex

By Katherine Bontrager

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"I also carried the baby very low, which coincides with the thought that if you carry low it's a boy versus if you carry high [it's] supposed to be a girl," says Risdahl.

After all those signs, the Risdahls chose the name Noah for their boy. "Well, according to the sonograms, we're having a girl," the mom-to-be says. "So we changed her name from Noah to Noa and added Grace – Noa Grace. I had the technician check again at 26 weeks to make sure she was a girl because I didn't want to end up with a boy forced to wear pink things. They still said it was definitely a girl."

A Professional Opinion
Moriah Petrini is a doula practitioner and the senior media associate for the Baseline of Health Foundation in Fremont, Calif. She's heard countless ways to determine the sex of a baby. Among the theories? If the fetal heart rate is over 140, the baby will be a girl. If the heart rate is under 140, it's a boy. But the truth of the matter?

"In the handful of studies investigating the relationship between fetal heart rate and fetal sex, heart rates did not differ significantly between male and female fetuses," says Petrini. "And the popular belief that women carrying boys carry low and that women carrying girls carry high just isn't true. The shape and height of your belly is determined by your muscle tone, uterine tone and the position the baby is in. That's why you may think you're having a boy because you're carrying low, when actually the baby just dropped lower into the pelvis because you're closer to delivery."


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