Can I Still Become Pregnant With A Baby Girl After My Ovulation Has Already Passed?
By: Sandy Dean: I so often hear from people who are worried that they won’t be able to choose their baby’s gender. Examples are the woman who wants to try to conceive a boy before ovulation or a girl after one. Luckily, there are other things that go into natural gender selection besides timing.
Nonetheless, I recently heard from someone who said: “I want to get pregnant with a girl baby. But I had sex yesterday and I think I ovulated a couple of days ago. I know that when you want a girl, you need to have intercourse before ovulation, so what are my chances of conceiving a girl now? Is it impossible?”
It’s very difficult to give actual odds, especially since other things besides timing can affect your baby’s gender (including your vaginal PH and the sexual positions used.) And this mother-to-be wasn’t even 100 percent sure if she had ovulated because she hadn’t used any ovulation predictors that tested bodily fluids. She was only using her own observations and intuition. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that she was right and that she did have sex 3 days after ovulation. The reason that it’s thought best to try for a boy after ovulation and a girl before it is this. Both theories are based on the fact that the boy or Y sperm can only live for a short period of time. Since the egg can live for a few days, if you want a boy, you need for the egg to wait for the sperm. It should not be the other way around. Therefore, having sex late (and after ovulation) ensures that more boy sperm are around to make their way toward the egg.
Does this mean that there are no girls left to fight for the egg? Absolutely not. Girl sperm lives for much longer than the boy sperm. So there should still be some girl sperm pregnant which could very well make it to the egg, but there will also be plenty of fresh boy sperm. And, that’s important to know because the boy sperm (when still viable) are faster than the girls.
That’s why, when you have the choice, you want to have sex well before ovulation. That way, the egg is not yet ready and the boy sperm that are present will either die off or slow down by the time ovulation happens. This is the ideal but this isn’t what always happens. Sometimes, scheduling isn’t as easy as we’d like to think.
To answer the question posed, it’s certainly possible to get pregnant with a girl baby after ovulation because there will still be girl sperm fighting for the egg. However, because there will also be plenty of (and possibly more) boy sperm which are faster, the situation is not as ideal as it could be. It’s certainly possible though. Think of it this way. If you had 3 quarters and a dime in your closed hand, it would certainly be possible to close your eyes and chose the dime, but statistically speaking, the quarters are more likely.
Let’s take the dime / quarter analogy a little further in terms of gender selection. Let’s say the Y sperm (boy producing) were the quarters and the X sperm (girl producing) were the dimes. Typically, there are equal numbers of both in terms of sperm. But there are things that the woman can do to encourage or discourage the X’s and Y’s, or in this case, dimes or quarters. If you want a girl baby, you want to make it so that there are as few dimes (Y’s) as possible and as many quarters (X’s) as possible. One way to do this is to have sex early. If you don’t accomplish this, you can still get lucky and have a girl. But a way to increase your odds even more is to make sure that your vaginal PH is acidic and to use shallow sexual positions (this discourages those boy sperm even more.)
It was too early to know if this mother-to-be had become pregnant. If she had not, she could try again next month. But that time, she could use a saliva ovulation predictor to help her make sure she had intercourse before ovulation. If you need help figuring out the idea timing and how this works with your PH, I’ve put together a few websites that might be useful. There’s more detailed instructions and resources that might make this process easier to understand. You can check out http://conceive-a-girl-baby.com or http://conceive-a-boy-baby.com depending on which is applicable to you.
