(Guest post by writer Maria Barker exclusively for The Alpha Parent)
You may enjoy flicking to the horoscopes page of your magazine, trying to get a sneak preview into what this month will bring you, but could the stars go so far as to help you to conceive? According to advocates of a new fertility technique called astro-fertility, yes they can! Astro-fertility works on the premise that there are only two or three times a year a woman can become pregnant and successfully give birth. Those particular times are different for each woman, as they are based on her and her partner’s time and place of birth and the alignment of planets at those moments. It is only when the position of those planets is replicated that a woman can conceive.
Ancient Links?
Sound a bit far fetched? Well the supposed link between fertility and astrology has long been established. The ancient Greeks believed Venus and Jupiter were responsible for how many children a person would have, and when they would have them, and ancient astrologers believed a woman could only conceive when the moon was in a certain alignment to the planets on the day she was born.
Several modern astrologers have built on these ancient theories and developed them into methods they claim will help a woman conceive. Psychiatrist and astrologer Dr Eugan Jones believes he has discovered a link between the position of the sun to the moon, and a woman’s fertility, and can therefore pinpoint a woman’s fertile points. He claims a woman can achieve conception only at certain phases of the moon, and these phases must match exactly the phase of the moon at the time when the woman was born. According to Jones, a woman is most fertile when the moon is the exact distance from the sun as it was at the woman’s birth. Some fertility astrologers claim it is even possible to use astrology to choose the sex of your baby, and accurately predict his/hers time and date of birth!
Any Truth?
It sounds wacky, but American IVF clinic Shady Grove fertility have hired fertility astrologer Nicola Smut to see if she can help their clients conceive.
So does it actually work? Don’t check your horoscopes just yet. To find out you’d need either an in-depth knowledge of the alignment patterns of the sun and moon, or be willing to pay an astrologer-fertility expert to do it for you. Advocates of the method rave about it, and many women swear that this technique helped them conceive after years of trying, and in many cases, several failed courses of ivf treatment. Not everyone agrees though. Professor of Fertility Robert Winston has slated astro-fertilty as ‘utter rubbish’. ‘There is not the slightest ¬evidence that star signs make the slightest difference to fertility,’ says Professor Winston. ‘It’s shocking to me that anyone would make that claim based on anecdotal events. What worries me is that infertility is the cause of desperate ¬sadness and couples will grasp any kind of straw such as this.
So opinion is divided on the effectiveness of this fertility method. None of the mums I spoke to had tried this method to conceive, (most having not even heard of it!), so the conventional approach is clearly the most tried and trusted still. If you’re interested in astrology and you’ve exhausted other methods without success, you might enjoy seeing if this method works for you, but remember that the effectiveness are disputed, and astro-fertillity shouldn’t be used as an alternative for consulting a doctor for fertility problems. If you’ve tried astro-fertility let us know if it worked for you!
