You’re seven months along, and you’ve just settled into a chair at a family cookout when somebody’s great aunt leans across the table and delivers her verdict. Your face looks fuller, so it must be a girl. You reached over your head for a plate, so now the cord is wrapped around the baby’s neck. You’re carrying high, or low, depending on which relative you ask. And you had better not buy anything blue, because that will jinx the whole thing.
None of it was meant unkindly. Most of it has been said to pregnant women for centuries, by people who genuinely wanted to help. That is exactly what makes pregnancy superstitions so stubborn. Every one of them grew up around something real, which is a body doing something extraordinary, and then got filled in with guesses. So what is actually behind the famous ones, and is any of it worth listening to? Let’s take them one at a time.
Why Pregnancy Collects So Many Old Wives’ Tales
Pregnancy has always attracted more folk wisdom than almost any other part of life, because it was the one thing families watched closely and understood least. I still settle in for a good old wives’ tale, I will admit. The phrase itself is older than most people realize. In this expression, wife did not mean a married woman. It comes from the Old English wif, which simply meant woman, and it survives in words like midwife and fishwife. A 1611 King James Bible translation of 1 Timothy 4:7 told readers to “refuse profane and old wives’ fables,” and the wording stuck as a slightly sneering label for anything a woman with no formal schooling might insist on. The tales themselves usually carried advice about the things women actually worried about: pregnancy, childbirth, feeding a family, and keeping a child alive. When you cannot see what is happening inside a body, a story is often the best explanation available.
Did you Know?
The word wife in old wives’ tale has nothing to do with marriage. It comes from the Old English wif, meaning woman, which is why a midwife and a fishwife aren’t necessarily married to fish.
The Heartburn and Hair Myth Is Partly True
This is the rare one with real evidence behind it. A study of 64 pregnant women found a measurable link between how much heartburn a mother reported and how much hair her newborn had. The research was published in the journal Birth in 2006 by Katherine Costigan, Hannah Sipsma, and Janet DiPietro. Sixty four pregnant women rated their heartburn, and independent coders who never met the mothers rated each newborn’s hair from two photographs. The connection held up. Women with more heartburn tended to have hairier babies, at a correlation of about 0.40, which is modest but hard to wave away. I love this one, because it is the rare tale that turned out to be right. Most of the women reporting moderate or severe heartburn, 23 out of 28, gave birth to babies with average or above average hair. The likeliest explanation is hormonal. Pregnancy hormones relax the valve at the top of the stomach, which is why heartburn is so common to begin with, and the same hormonal climate may encourage a fetus to grow more hair. So this tale was not nonsense. It was someone noticing a real pattern and handing it down!
Can a Full Moon Really Bring On Labor?
No. The moon has been blamed for everything from madness to labor, and the biggest studies have found nothing. I have to admit the idea has a certain pull. The lunar cycle runs about 29.5 days, close enough to a menstrual cycle to invite a guess, and the moon really does drag the oceans around. But human bodies are not tides. By the late 1980s, researchers had produced at least 40 published studies on the supposed moon and madness link and at least 20 on the moon and birth rate. When those were reviewed together, the pattern vanished. One analysis looked at 167,956 spontaneous vaginal deliveries in Phoenix, Arizona between 1995 and 2000 and found no relationship with the lunar phase. Another examined 564,039 births in North Carolina from 1997 to 2001 with the same result. A smaller study at a UCLA hospital tracked 11,961 live births over four years and could not connect them to the moon either. Would you have guessed the moon would get blamed for that many babies? I get why people believe it, though. What keeps it alive is not the data. It is that we remember the busy night that happened to fall on a full moon and forget all the busy nights that did not.
Boy or Girl? The Belly Shape and the Ring Test
Carrying high or low, craving sweet or salty, and dangling a ring over the belly will all give you an answer. None of them beat a coin flip. I will say, the ring test is at least fun to watch. The shape of a pregnant belly is decided by things like how the baby’s positioned, how tall the mother is, how strong her abdominal muscles are, and how much amniotic fluid she’s carrying. It has nothing to do with whether the baby is a boy or a girl. The ring test, where a wedding ring on a string swings one way for a boy and the other for a girl, is a fine party trick and a poor predictor! The famous Chinese birth chart, which claims to sort gender by the mother’s age and the month of conception, has been checked against actual records and does no better than chance. People have been reading signs off pregnant bodies for as long as they’ve been reading signs off anything else. If you enjoy that sort of thing, the old belief about what an itchy palm is supposed to mean has the same flavor: a sign that’s always been more about hope than evidence.
The Fear of “Marking” the Baby
For centuries, people believed a shock or a craving during pregnancy could stamp itself onto the child. Doctors took it seriously, and it left a trail of heartbreak. The idea is called maternal impression. It held that a powerful experience in the mother’s mind could leave a mark on the baby, and it was used to explain birth defects at a time when nobody knew how traits were inherited. Its roots go back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle and Hippocrates both argued that a mother’s imagination played a role in what she carried, and it echoes through older stories too. In Genesis, Jacob sets striped rods in front of mating sheep and goats so that they will bear spotted young. The theory was discredited in the mid to late 1700s, but it hung on into the 1800s, and it was not abandoned for good until genetics caught up. Gregor Mendel’s work on inheritance showed why a mother’s fright could not remodel a fetus. The cruelest example is Joseph Merrick, the man remembered as the Elephant Man, whose mother was said to have been frightened by an elephant while pregnant with him. She was blamed for a condition she had no part in causing. I cannot imagine carrying that. Breeders believed it too, and some Aberdeen Angus farmers painted their barns black in the hope of getting black calves.
Reaching Over Your Head and Other Small Curses
Raising your arms above your head will not wrap the cord around your baby’s neck, and keeping quiet about the pregnancy will not keep it safe. A nuchal cord, where the umbilical cord loops around the neck, is common and usually harmless, and it forms on its own as the baby moves around in the womb. There is no mechanism by which a mother stretching for a shelf could cause it. The same goes for the old rule against attending funerals, or the instruction to hide the news until the first trimester is over. That last one feels cautious and kind, and plenty of people still follow it, but the reason most miscarriages happen early is almost always a chromosomal problem in the developing embryo, not a careless word. The advice survives because it spares a grieving family from having to explain, which is a reasonable thing to want, even if the superstition behind it is not real.
Cravings, Scissors, and One Genuinely Strange Belief
Most cravings are harmless, most of these rules are harmless, and then there’s a belief so strange it became a medical case study. A common tale warns that an unsatisfied craving will leave a birthmark shaped like the food, a strawberry patch for strawberries, a port wine stain for wine. There’s no evidence for it. The rules pile up around pregnancy much the way they collect around weddings and umbrellas, two other areas of life where rain on the big day or an umbrella opened indoors has been given a meaning it probably doesn’t have. But one belief stands apart, and I promise I am not making this up. In parts of rural India, a condition called puppy pregnancy syndrome has been documented, in which a person believes that a dog bite has caused puppies to grow inside their abdomen. The psychiatrist Arabinda Chowdhury and his colleagues described it in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry in 2003, noting reports from states including West Bengal, Bihar, and Jharkhand. Sufferers believe they will die, and men believe they will give birth through the penis (yes, it gets stranger the longer you sit with it). It’s a culture bound condition, and the real danger is not the imaginary puppies. It’s that a person bitten by a rabid dog may go to a folk healer instead of a hospital and miss the vaccine that would save them.
The Old Advice That Actually Holds Up
A few of the oldest rules put a finger on genuine dangers, just not for the reasons anyone gave. Pregnant women have long been told to stay away from cat litter. The fear used to be about a cat stealing a baby’s breath or some other old story, but the real reason is a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which can be passed in cat feces and can harm a developing fetus. The advice to avoid raw or undercooked meat and unpasteurized dairy lands on the same parasite, along with a list of other infections! Avoiding alcohol is another rule that only gained a solid scientific footing later, and the guidance now is that no amount of it is known to be safe. The old aunties were not doing microbiology. They’d simply noticed that some things went wrong after some behaviors, and they built a rule around what they saw. Cats have carried a heavy load of folklore for exactly this reason, blamed for everything from bad luck to stolen breath, while the one thing genuinely worth avoiding about them was a parasite nobody could see.
So Are These Tales Worth Keeping?
The old wives’ tales are mostly wrong, and they’re not going anywhere, because they were doing a job that facts could not do yet. Almost every pregnancy superstition started as someone trying to make sense of a body they couldn’t see inside. Sometimes the pattern was real, as with heartburn and hair. Often it wasn’t. The moon did not do it, the belly shape does not tell you the sex, and the ring on the string is a toy. What the tales reveal is a very human habit of reaching for a story when the truth is out of reach, and pregnancy, which hides its whole show behind a layer of skin, is the perfect stage for that habit. Myself, I will take the odd old story over the scary ones any day lol. The trick is to keep the comfort and drop the rules that frighten people, because a mother told she caused her baby’s illness is being handed a guilt she never earned.
Here’s the part I keep coming back to. Which old wives’ tale did you hear the most while you were expecting, and did anyone ever manage to convince you it was true? Thanks for reading! I wish you and yours a safe and healthy delivery whenever the stork finally shows up.
