A new medical study confirms, yet again, that fetal heart rate can't tell a pregnant woman if her baby is a boy or a girl.
As the old wives' tale has it, if your unborn baby's heart rate is higher, above 140 beats per minute, that means you're carrying a girl. A lower heart rate below 140 bpm means you're having a boy.
It's hard to resist such an easy test, because for nearly every woman in the early stages of pregnancy, the baby's heart rate is just about the only thing we can find out about it. So it's easy to try to over-analyze this little bit of information we can get.
But don't get your hopes up, or have your hopes dashed, based on your baby's heart rate, because it has absolutely nothing to do with what your baby has between its legs. This was proven beyond question 20 years ago, by a senior sonographer who analyzed thousands of births to establish that fetal heart rate did not correlate with the baby's sex. (See link to study below.)
Quite convincing data, but still I decided to conduct my own experiment to see if fetal heart rate could indicate a baby's gender. To do my experiment, I first became pregnant with boy/girl twins. Then, I underwent a LOT of fetal heart monitoring, including one week of almost constant monitoring while hospitalized for preterm labor, as well as twice-weekly non-stress tests in which both babies heart rates were tracked for 30 minutes. (You can see I am quite dedicated to the interests of science.)
The result? Sometimes the boy's heart rate was higher, sometimes the girl's heart rate was higher. No pattern, except that when one of the babies seemed to be more active, kicking and moving around alot, that baby's heart rate would tend to be higher. It makes sense, that a baby's heart rate might vary a good bit depending on whether it's active or at rest at the time the heart rate is checked.
As if my own research weren't convincing enough, a new study, published in Fetal Diagnosis and Therapy, tells us that analysis of over 500 births proves again that fetal heart rate cannot predict whether a baby is a boy or a girl.
Contrary to beliefs commonly held by many pregnant women and their families, there are no significant differences between male and female fetal heart rate during the first trimester.
Medical study, link below
So the next time you see a post in a pregnancy forum from a mother "proving" this theory is right because her two girls had high heart rates and her three friends had boys with low heart rates, you can set the record straight on this old wives' tale: it's false.