I sometimes hear from couples who already have one child of a certain gender or sex and are trying to conceive another child. This time around, they want to get the opposite gender but they worry that this is not going to be possible for them. I often hear comments like “my first child was a boy. Does that mean that I am more likely to get a boy the second time?” Or “if my first baby was a girl does this mean I’m more likely to have a girl this time?”
I understand why couples have these suspicions. Most of us know a family or two that has all girls or all boys and we can begin to think that certain genders run in families. Worse, we begin to think that this is going to happen to us. So that if we have one or two boys, we start to worry that we can’t have a girl. Or, if we had a girl a first time, we worry that we won’t ever have a son to carry on the family name.
Neither of these concerns need to be true. In fact, each time you conceive, you have a 50 / 50 chance of a boy or a girl, if you do nothing to help along these odds. This holds true no matter how many babies or pregnancies you have had previously. Studies have shown that X and Y sperm are equally represented during a man’s ejaculation. And each ejaculation or attempt at conception starts over with the same ratio.
Think of it this way, let’s say you have a paper bag and inside, you put 100 little pieces of paper marked with either X or Y (the sperm chromosomes that produce either boy or girl babies.) You mark 50 of the papers with an X and 50 with a Y. You put them all in a bag so you can’t see and you shake the bag around. You stick your hand in (without looking) and pick out a paper. Let’s pretend that if you pick an X, you’d get a girl. If you picked a Y, you’d get a boy.
This is sort of how it works in real life. There are equal numbers of boy and girl producing sperm. Sure, certain factors can affect the sperm in certain ways making one gender more likely than the other (which I’ll discuss later) but on the surface, the odds are even. The next time you try to conceive, you start over with the same odds. For the bag example, there would once again be 50 X’s and 50 Y’s. This is true no matter what you drew before. The odds reset at each conception. Your body doesn’t know what you have already conceived and studies have shown that a man’s sperm as having equal ratios of each chromosome which produces each gender.
If This Is True, Why Do Boys Or Girls Seem To Run In Families?: I can’t deny that some couples do seem to have only boys or girls. You can chalk this up to chance and many people do. Or, like me, you can believe that there are some other external factors at play. I personally believe that some women are more acidic or alkaline naturally and that this sometimes (but not always) makes them more likely to have a string of boys or girls. For example, if a woman is naturally very acidic, she would arguably have a better chance of having girls because an acidic environment is detrimental to boy sperm. In the same way, an alkaline vaginal environment makes you slightly more likely to get a boy, at least in my opinion.
So what happens if you have one gender and are trying to have a second baby and want to make sure you get the other gender? Take your PH and see if it is in alignment with what you already have. In other words, if you have a boy and are alkaline right now, you can make attempts to become more acidic if you want a girl. Or if you already have a girl and test and find that you are acidic, you could change your diet or douche to become more alkaline. There are other considerations too (like timing and sexual positions) but I really wanted to keep the focus on stressing that your odds truly are the same with each conception unless your vaginal environment always trends more toward alkalinity or acidity.
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