When someone is pregnant (or you), it's often a time of speculation about whether the baby will be a boy or a girl. Sometimes, mothers say they just know if they are having a boy or a girl.
In an interview for Revista Who, Dojna Mema said: "In our case, we weren't praying to have a child, but when we found out we wanted it with all our strength. I have felt since that moment also his gender. I knew it was a boy. There is something magical, from another world, in the sensations and intuition of a pregnant woman."
Are there studies on the intuition of pregnant women? Yes. An interesting study investigated whether or not a woman's intuition about the baby's gender was accurate (McFadzen, Dielentheis, Kasten, Singh, & Grundle, 2017). Women attending an obstetric clinic were asked if they had a sense of the gender of their baby; 411 women (40%) said yes. Their prediction was compared with the results at the end. So? The mother's intuition correctly predicted the gender 51% of the time.
The study noted that women who reported strong intuition had better results (correctly predicting the baby's gender 62% of the time). However, the study authors concluded that intuition worked just like guessing when flipping a coin.
However, some other scientific research suggests that yes, pregnant women's intuition is true. At the University of Arizona, psychology professor Victor Shamas, Ph.D., analyzed some expectant mothers who did not yet know the sex of their babies. In 70% of cases, mothers' intuition about the gender of their child was correct. In a separate study, researchers at Johns Hopkins University had comparable data. "The fact that two different labs had similar effects suggests that it's not just a coincidence," says Shamas.
But what is intuition? "I define it as something you know without knowing how you know it," says Shamas. True intuition tends to come not from our five senses, but from a sixth sense. Intuition isn't just a hope or wish for what you want, says Shamas, who found that the women in his study who actually preferred having a boy or a girl were more likely to be wrong.
