One of the biggest curiosities for parents during pregnancy is knowing if the baby will be a boy or a girl . Predictions about the sex of the baby before it is born are commonplace until it is confirmed by a medical test or an ultrasound, although sometimes they can also fail .

There are precise ways and others based on popular wisdom that have been passed down from generation to generation. We will talk about the scientific and non-scientific methods to predict the sex of the baby in pregnancy .

Unscientific methods to predict the sex of the baby

With any of these methods we can have a good time predicting what the baby’s sex will be, but only as a game, since they have no scientific basis . They are simply probabilities, and they do not agree with each other, so as you can see, the results they produce are not very (or not at all) reliable . You will tell us if you agree 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 she becomes pregnant (in the vertical columns) and the month in which the baby is conceived (in the horizontal rows).
• Mayan table – Apparently the Mayans had their own methods of prediction based on statistics that they made themselves. The Mayan table to find out the sex of the baby also combines the age of the mother and the month in which she became pregnant.
• Lunar calendar : the lunar calendar to know the sex of the baby takes into account the date of the day of the baby’s conception, but this is not easy to check in all cases, especially if the woman has irregular cycles.
• The shape of the belly : if it is round it will be a girl and if it is pointed, a boy, it is a myth . The shape and size of the belly 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 to the month in which she became pregnant. If it comes out even, it’s a boy, if it comes out odd, it’s a girl.
• Mobile applications : with new technologies, tools that supposedly predict the sex of the baby have already come out , but they are not at all reliable.
• Cravings : Cravings in pregnancy are also often related to the sex of the baby, but they are also not true.

Scientific methods to know the sex of the baby

• Blood analysis : it consists of extracting a blood sample from the mother to analyze the non-cellular DNA fragments in the plasma, coming from the fetus. From the seventh week, the presence of these fragments in the mother’s blood is sufficient to assess, in more than 95% of cases, whether the fetus is a carrier of the Y chromosome (so it would be a male) or not ( so it would be female).
• Amniocentesis : It is an invasive test that consists of 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 the sex.
• Ultrasound : Ultrasound is the most widely used method today to find out the sex of the baby. It is in the second ultrasound , around week 20 and depending on the position of the baby, that the baby’s genitals can be seen with greater reliability to determine if it will be a boy or a girl.
• Position of the placenta : also known as the Ramzi method (named after the gynecologist who discovered it) it is based on the position of the placenta with respect to the fetus to determine the sex of the baby even from the first ultrasound . It ensures that it has a 97% reliability even if the genitals are not seen.

Although for many future parents it is very important to know the sex of the baby as soon as possible, there are also those who choose to go into labor without knowing the sex of the baby . It is a matter of preferences. But at the end of the day, the important thing is not that he is a boy or a girl , but that he is welcomed, loved and desired from the first moment.