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19 Ways to Know (and Guess!) If You're Having a Boy or Girl

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Dina Roth Port on Jul 25, 2012 at 5:58PM

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19 Ways to Know (and Guess!) If You're Having a Boy or Girl

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Pink or Blue? How to Know If You're Having a Boy or a Girl

Forget about waiting 40 torturous weeks to determine the sex of your baby. Practically since the beginning of time, moms-to-be and the people who love them have come up with ways to try and figure out if that bun in the oven is a sweet little girl or a bouncing baby boy. If getting a surprise in the delivery room isn’t your style, check out the following ways -- both scientific and downright odd -- to determine whether you should break out the pink or blue.

Genetic Blood Test
Will It Work? Yes!
While blood tests that claim to predict your baby’s gender as early as seven weeks have been around for a few years outside of the U.S., they’ve never been very popular here -- in part because it was unclear whether they worked. But a surprising analysis of 57 studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that these tests, which detect small pieces of fetal DNA that are present in a mom’s bloodstream during pregnancy, can be between 95% and 99% accurate. Screening kits, like the Pink or Blue Early DNA Pregnancy Test (available for $25), look for the presence of the male Y chromosome in a few drops of blood taken through a finger prick. If it’s there, you’re having a boy; if not, it’s a girl. (Because of this, the tests are slightly more accurate at predicting boys, since a lack of Y chromosome may mean that the male chromosome wasn’t present in the blood sample taken.)