One of the most common questions I’ve gotten from swayers is about pregnancy symptoms and gender. Does craving sweets = girls and craving salty foods = boys? Does morning sickness mean you’re having a girl and carrying low mean a boy? And what about heart rate?
For some, this subject has caused a good deal of stress. A few people have even contemplated terminating pregnancies based on nothing more than some vague symptoms! But I can state definitively, based on decades of advising tens of thousands of swayers, that pregnancy symptoms DO NOT predict gender. There is no known biological mechanism for girl pregnancies to cause any different symptoms than boy pregnancies during the first trimester.
Many people assume that because males have testosterone, boy pregnancies will have more testosterone and testosterone will cause different pregnancy symptoms. But it’s IMPOSSIBLE for this to be the case. XX and XY babies start out hormonally identical because the Y chromosome is dormant at first. All babies start out life as “girls” because only the X chromosome is active. It is not until the 10th week that XY babies even start to make much testosterone - by which point most women's first trimester symptoms are clearing up! And baby boys in utero make far more testosterone later in pregnancy than they do early on - yet we don’t have morning sickness then, when testosterone levels are the highest. Pregnancy symptoms cannot be caused by testosterone or lack thereof.
And while girl pregnancies make slightly more HCG on average than boy pregnancies do, many do not experience pregnancy symptoms from even sky-high HCG levels. Others have more severe symptoms from pregnancies with lower HCG levels than higher ones. Most importantly, HCG differences between XX and XY are only an average, with a lot of overlap between the two. HCG works like human height - there can be short men or tall women and most people fall in the midrange. The average man is taller than the average woman but there are still tons and tons of men that are shorter than tons and tons of women. You can’t tell just by looking at one person’s height in isolation what gender they are. You could have a WNBA player or a jockey on your hands - or more likely, a person of either gender who is 5 ft. 8 inches tall. Please do not read anything into HCG levels.
Heart rate has been totally debunked (even though some misguided medical professionals still mention it.) It’s been widely studied and except for a possible, minuscule statistical difference in the last week of pregnancy (baby is 39 weeks gestation at that stage, about to be born) there was no correlation between gender and heart rate. The primary thing that affects heart rate is the gestation of your pregnancy, so if you’re convinced that your baby is a boy or a girl because the heart rate is different from a previous pregnancy, check the gestation first because the average heart rate of a fetus varies dramatically by age, NOT gender. If you had your heart rate tested in your previous pregnancy at 10 weeks, and now you’re in week 14, the difference in heart rate tells you only that you’re further along this time.
Not even morning sickness predicts gender. The old wives’ tales say “sickness equals girls” but that has been debunked by studies. No difference in levels of morning sickness between male and female pregnancies was found. In fact, many of us on Gender Dreaming actually found we had less sickness with our girl pregnancies than with our boys (this was true for me - I had very little sickness with my daughter and my 2nd son, and was quite sick with my other three boys). A very small statistical difference was found in the number of women who suffered from hyperemesis in pregnancy, but it was only 3%. About 48% of hyperemesis sufferers were pregnant with boys, about 51% with girls. Your levels of nausea don’t predict your baby’s gender.
While there have been studies that found women who had boys reported being hungrier in pregnancy than women who had girls, this is something that is very hard to quantify as most of us are hungrier in pregnancy ANYWAY. Can you really compare your level of hungriness now versus 3, 5, 7 years ago with any level of accuracy? People just do not have that capability. Additionally, many people who were on the Low Everything Diet for pink report increased hunger in their pregnancy, but that’s probably because they were eating more restrictively beforehand.
People often ask me if a bigger baby means it’s a boy, but this isn’t reliably the case. Each pregnancy is different and your baby’s size does not predict their gender OR even their adult height. My daughter was my second biggest baby despite now being a very petite twelve year old. Additionally, ultrasounds predicting a baby’s size are notoriously inaccurate - people are often told to expect a very big baby only to have a normal-size one. And you may have your dates wrong about when you conceived. Even though they’re not reliable in terms of your baby’s size at birth, in terms of gestational development, ultrasounds are more reliable than your memory or even temping and charting. Your ovulation may have been delayed, or you may be farther along than you realize, which makes a baby look larger or smaller than you expected, when it’s really exactly the size he/she should be for their gestation.
Because the majority of people have only two or three pregnancies, sometimes they believe they see trends where none exist. If you talk to people with many pregnancies the trends fall apart. I myself have had 5 pregnancies. My first, I had morning sickness in the morning only, and threw up every day. My second, I had barely any sickness at all, felt great - if he'd have been a girl, I would have for sure thought it was gender related, it was so very different. My third, I was horribly nauseous all day, had weeklong migraines, felt so tired I couldn't even drive by myself because I'd doze off, had a horrible taste in my mouth and I smelled really bad odors no one else could smell. With my 4th, I was slightly less nauseous than with my first or third children (still plenty nauseous, and it lasted all day long) and I had diarrhea all day long for three months - one of the more awful pregnancy symptoms I’ve experienced. Finally, with my 5th pregnancy, my girl, I felt good, very much like I did with my second pregnancy - which was a BOY - except I had some food aversions, was a little dizzy a few times early on, and had the bad taste in my mouth again.
My two most similar pregnancies were different genders, and my 3 other pregnancies were all very different from each other despite being the same gender. It could easily have been that my two similar pregnancies just happened to be girls, and the others were boys…or vice versa. Many women have shockingly different pregnancies yet have the exact same gender - and no one knows why! Why was I only dizzy with one pregnancy? Why did I have such a terrible experience with my fourth kiddo and not the others? Why did I only throw up with DS 1? I don't know - no one knows - and it really doesn't seem to be correlated to anything other than random chance.
One last thing - your feelings, emotional state, and dreams do NOT predict your baby’s gender. I have seen 1,234,567,910 people obsessing over their feelings, emotions, dreams, mood swings, etc all throughout their pregnancy…in some cases even messaging me on a semi-regular basis with updates about the dreams they had… and it is NOT RELIABLE. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to feelings on an individual level (like if you look back and recall one of your pregnancies was different and it was the only one you had a different gender) and I don’t want to quibble over details or call into question anyone’s belief system. But emotional state is simply not reliable as a method of gender prediction.
Now, again, I know there are some of you who believe symptom spotting worked for you and that's totally cool. You know your own body. But for those who are reading all this and thinking that anyone else’s experience tells you anything reliable about the gender of your baby, and are now getting super sad or super happy, please don't. Take all the people who think symptom spotting worked for them and set them aside, compare to the people who say it didn't work for them, and even if it's better than 50-50 it still simply cannot be reliable because there is no guarantee that it will work for you!
I am never saying "symptoms don't predict gender" to doubt anyone's word or to discount their experiences. I'm not even trying to prevent you guys from telling other people that symptom spotting worked for you. But I have to be the party pooper who comes along to spoil the party because I have seen far, far too many people who had their hearts stomped on by people - totally innocent, well meaning people - telling them "oh yes that was totally true for me".
Let's say for the sake of argument that 25% of people really do have different symptoms for different genders - that they’re completely right, it did work for them. That STILL MEANS that symptoms don't predict gender. Even though some people believe it worked for them, and maybe it even did, unless it works for everyone, all the time, in every case, then symptoms don’t predict gender - because something that doesn't work for everyone, doesn't reliably work! Telling people it may work sometimes and not other times simply is setting people up for disappointment.
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