What's Good About Morning Sickness?
(continued)

The Good News About Morning Sickness:

• Morning sickness is an indication that the fetus is growing.  Women who experience morning sickness are less likely to miscarry or to deliver their babies prematurely.  
• Past performance is no predictor of future performance. Every pregnancy is different, even in the same mother:  you may have minimal morning sickness in one pregnancy and have more morning sickness in your next pregnancy, or vice versa. There are really no good studies that explain this.
• Most women have enough "reserves" in their body to nourish the fetus regardless of how nauseated they are or how "little" they seem to be eating.
• Morning sickness generally only lasts for the first 3 months of pregnancy. . .it always ends with delivery.

An "old wives tale" says that the gender of the fetus can impact morning sickness:  that the more ill your feel, the more likely you are to have a girl.  I, of course thought this was incredibly sexist and insulting, until I vomited daily for nine months when pregnant with my daughter after having had fairly manageable morning sickness when first pregnant with my son.  Three years later a paper was published in the medical journal Lancet  (12/10/98) which studied over one million pregnant women in Sweden and found that those who suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum were more likely to have girls than boys.   Whereas the overall ratio of live female births to live male births was 49% to 51%, the women who were hospitalized with severe morning sickness during the first three months of pregnancy had a ratio of 56% girls to 44% boys.

The hypothesis the researchers proposed is that perhaps hormone levels are higher or different somehow in pregnancies of females versus males; their study did not test that hypothesis, however.  And while this information is interesting, it's not a reliable predictor of gender, nor does it have any other practical value.  Any pregnant woman experiencing morning sickness needs careful evaluation by her obstetrician, and in some cases further evaluation may be necessary.