Elevating Your Legs After Sex When You're Trying to Conceive - Does This Favor a Girl Or a Boy Baby?

It's common advice to tell a women who is trying to conceive or to get pregnant to hold her legs to her chest or to elevate her legs and hips after sex for about twenty minutes.  The reason for this advice is that it's assumed that the elevation of your legs increases the angle that will force the sperm toward your cervix / reproductive tract and will allow less hard working and viable sperm to escape. 

The other day, someone asked me if this practice would increase the odds of conceiving a girl or boy baby.  Specifically, she wanted to know "if I want to get pregnant with a girl, would elevating my legs after intercourse help my odds or hurt them?"  I'll tell you what I told her in the following article.

Does Elevating Your Legs After Sex Really Do Anything To Help You Get Pregnant?:  The jury is still out on this one.  I suppose if your partner had a low sperm count or his sperm were compromised in some way, then it doesn't hurt to use every advantage or to try everything that you can.  The amount of semen in a man's ejaculation varies because of many different factors, including how much time has passed since the last ejaculation and the age or your partner. 

Larger amounts are seen after longer periods of abstinence.  In general though, most men will emit between 1.5 and 5 milliliters. Typically ejaculate would contain 60 -80 million sperm chromosomes per milliliter.  So if your partner (assuming he is healthy) were about average and emitted 2 milliliters, you'd have around 120 -160 million sperm fighting to reach your egg.  This is obviously an astronomical number so unless you just had bad aim, elevating your legs may be over kill, but as I said, it's an easy, free, and noninvasive practice, so it certainly doesn't hurt to try.

So Does Elevating Your Legs / Hips Increase The Odds Having Having A Girl Or Boy Baby?:  Again, there's not a lot of documentation about this, but here is what I think based on what I know to be true about this topic.   Conventional wisdom and research tells us to use shallow penetration if we want to conceive a daughter and deep penetration if we want a son. 

The reason for this is that the Y sperm chromosomes (boy producing) are less viable and are shorter lived.  By using deeper penetration, you're giving them an easier road and a shorter trip.  I would think that elevating your legs falls into this same category.  And I would also think that the very strong girl sperm could survive and make their way toward your egg just fine without your needing to elevate your legs.

The bottom line for me would be if you want to conceive a girl, you really don't need to do this unless you're having some fertility issues.  But, this practice would not hurt if you wanted a boy.

However, I firmly believe that this practice alone would not be enough to get you the gender that you want.  You'd also need to time your conception to the letter (depending on when you ovulate and which gender you want) and you'd need to make your body / vaginal canal more alkaline for a boy conception and more acidic for a girl one.