Determining the babies’ gender by the shape of the abdomen
Recently (January 2 nd , 2007) NY Times looked into this topic at predicting babies gender based on the shape of the mother’s belly: “ If a pregnant women is carrying low, it’s a boy. If she’s carrying high, it’s a girl. And if she’s carrying all the weight out front in the shape of a basketball, then it’s probably a boy”. However, this method of detecting baby’s gender has no scientific basis. Most experts say the only reason it has persisted for so long is that, much like flipping a coin, there is a 50/50 chance of it being right. Doctors at Johns Hopkins University studied belly’s shape in 104 pregnant women. They concluded that the shape of the abdomen was a poor predictor of a baby’s sex. “But some findings were unexpected. Women with more than 12 years of education correctly predicted the sex of their babies in about 70 percent of the time, compared with 43 percent of the time for less educated women. We will discuss the scientific approach to gender detection soon.