Boy or girl - can you choose? more...

Q: What about dipping your man’s erect penis in a pint of freezing water before having sex to improve the chance of conception?

NO

Are you mad? Even if you can actually persuade your man to let you try this, it will simply make keeping the erection totally impossible! Yes, sperm like to be kept slightly below body temperature, but chilling them at this stage of the proceedings won’t be of any benefit – they might even stop swimming altogether!

Boy or Girl – can you choose?

Basically, the sex of your baby is like tossing a coin – heads for a boy, tails for a girl. Having said that. you do have a slightly higher chance of having a boy – 51 per cent of babies born in the UK are male.

Your partner’s sperm will decide the gender of your baby: your eggs contain just a female, (X) chromosome, but a man’s sperm contains either an X or a Y chromosome. Whichever one reaches the egg first and fertilises it will determine the sex of your unborn baby.

Girl sperm are larger, live longer and swim slowly. Boy sperm swim faster, so have a better chance of reaching your egg first if it’s waiting to be fertilised. If the sperm has to wait for an egg to be released, the boy sperm dies off before the girl sperm so there’s likely to be more girl sperm waiting to fertilise the egg.

So can you choose? Not really! But you could try having sex as close a possible to ovulation (when the egg is released) to conceive a boy, or just before ovulation to conceive a girl.

Now read this:
The low-down on conceiving a boy or girl
Try our fun baby sex-predictor!
How to influence the sex of your baby...

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