Chinese Birth Calendar – Predict Your Babies Gender

Posted: 2. May, 2011 0

The Chinese Birth Calendar is a chart that was supposedly discovered approximately seven hundred years ago in Beijing and currently resides at the Beijing Institute of Science. This calendar is said to predict the fetus’s gender by factoring together maternal age and the month in which the mother conceived. We first heard of this chart/calendar from our sister-in-law, who explained to us that she had heard that the calendar accurately predicts gender 99 percent of the time. This obviously piqued our interest. Whenever you hear that something is 99 percent accurate, you pay attention.

Basically, the chart consists of two axes. The vertical axis plots the age of the mother at conception, while the horizontal axis plots the month in which the pregnancy was conceived. Lines are drawn on the chart, and the point at which the lines intersect is where you find the gender of the fetus.

We want the reader to know that, just for fun, we went through a small sample of ten charts in our office of women who had delivered with us. We reviewed the ultrasound determination of fetal gender along with the actual gender determined at the time of birth, and these were compared to the Chinese calendar prediction. We discovered that the Chinese calendar method was correct in nine out of the ten cases.

In further analyzing this method of gender prediction, there are some remarkable generalizations that can be made. According to the calendar, if a woman conceives when she is eighteen years of age, she has an 80 percent chance of having a girl. If she conceives when she is twenty-one, she has a 90 percent chance of having a girl. We could not think of any medical reason or study that demonstrated why a woman would have a girl 90 percent of the time during one calendar year of her life and not another. A simple look at the delivery log book at our labor and delivery center did not demonstrate this effect.

Two variables in the calendar could be cause for error. The first is the actual month of conception. Most due dates are determined by the woman’s first day of her last menstrual period. In reality, conception doesn’t occur until at least two weeks after the last menstrual period. Pregnancy begins once the sperm and the egg meet in the fallopian tube, and that only occurs after ovulation, which is usually about two weeks after the first day of the last menstrual period. For example, if your last menstrual period was October 24, you likely became pregnant at or around November 7. So in this case, conception occurred in November, not October.

The second variable that gives cause for error pertains to the mother’s age. According to the calendar, the age used is the mother’s age at the time she delivers. The only way to know that is to wait until the delivery, since there are two weeks both before and after the actual due date that are factors in a full-term pregnancy, anywhere from thirty-eight to forty-two weeks.

There is also the possibility of having a preterm, or premature baby, which obviously wouldn’t be predictable until after delivery either and therefore not of much use for those wanting to know gender prior to delivery.

Related Posts:

• How Accurate Is Gender Prediction With Ultrasound?