Hsinchu’s medical community is awash with rumors that childless couples are falling pregnant after placing ceremonial shovels under their beds.
Local obstetricians and gynecologists report patients telling them of this new use of the ceremonial shovels, which are traditionally used when breaking ground on construction sites. The superstition can trace its origins to a linguistic similarity. In Chinese the word for shovel is chan, which rhymes with the word for “give birth to a child.“ Despite the claimed successes, the medical community maintains that the births should be attributed to improvements in reproductive medicine, which have increased the probability of getting pregnant.
A woman surnamed Wu from Hsinchu City started to take human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) shots because she was infertile and remained childless after several years of marriage. Later on, she found out that her friend surnamed Lin borrowed a ceremonial shovel, placed it under her bed and unexpectedly succeeded in falling pregnant. Wu then asked to borrow the shovel from Lin.
After placing the shovel under her bed for about a year, Wu also discovered that she had a bun in the oven. Then after Lin gave birth to a boy, Wu also gave birth to her own chubby baby boy. Wu said that she was originally going to give the shovel back to Lin, but said that a workmate of hers who wanted to become pregnant borrowed it from her straight away. It wasn’t until later that Wu found out the shovel had been used by at least five couples before her and that they had used the shovel to give birth to four boys and one girl.
Lin Cheng-kai, head of the Reproductive Medicine Center at Hsinchu Cathay General Hospital said that he had heard of several women who wished to get pregnant talk about the use of such methods and that originally he did not believe in such a nonscientific method. However as the number of “successful” cases increased, he even considered collecting statistics on the number of successful clinical tests.
A doctor became curious and asked an expecting mother how she had placed the shovel under the bed. One of his pregnant patients said that a feng shui geomancer had told her that if she wanted a boy, she had to place it with its reverse side facing up, while if she wanted a girl, she had to lay it with its right side facing up and that the man should sleep on the left side of the bed while the women should sleep on the right side of the bed. Obstetricians and gynaecologists have heard of countless numbers of superstitious prescriptions that are supposed to help women conceive.
Qualified gynecologist and former director of the Chinese Medical Department at Hsinchu General Hospital Dr Tseng Ching-huei said that one woman suffering from infertility had heard that her friend had given birth to a few babies in her house and that a feng shui master had told her that the position of that house was good and advised her to “borrow the feng shui” from there by moving in to live there. After swapping houses for half a year, she also became pregnant.
Lin also said that many infertile women became pregnant after heeding advice on changing the layout and decoration of their home from a feng shui master and that some had even become pregnant after going to a certain place to take a special “give birth to a son” bath or by changing their bedroom doors and the position their bed is placed. Despite the proliferation of miracle cures for infertility, doctors still believe that modern medical science is the only way to substantially increase the success rate of becoming pregnant.
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