Last month I received a question from a woman who asked, “Will my baby be born at the birth center and when?” When I asked for clarification, she explained that her birth date was imminent and that she ideally wanted to deliver at the birth center, but was waiting to see if the baby would come on her own in the next two weeks. After two weeks, the querent would have to be induced at the hospital. So I understood her question to mean both “Can I do what I want,” i.e. deliver at the birth center, and “When will the baby be born?” She gave me permission to post her questions and my reply here.
When will my baby arrive?
(Chart data: 22 Dec 2009, 6:22 am EST, Arlington Massachusetts USA. 18 Sagittarius rising, Moon 5 Pisces.)
First, it’s sweet to see Lord 5, the baby, inside the first house. A perfect description of pregnancy: baby inside mother.
Lord 1 is Jupiter, dignified in its term, so the querent has some power (essential dignity) to do what she wants. This is a limited sort of dignity. She’s not in her rulership, she can’t control everything about her situation, but she does have some say in the matter. So my answer to “Can I do what I want?” is “Yes, to some extent.”
How can we know when the baby will make her entrance? I looked at two different factors to judge that. First, with the Ascendant at 18 Sagittarius and Lord 5 Venus at 25 Sagittarius, the baby is just 7 degrees of arc away from rising in the east . That is, she’s leaving the first house (i.e. the querent) and emerging into the light. But would the 7 degrees translate into 7 hours or 7 days? I suggested days.
My other thought was to look at what the Moon was doing as a general indication of what would happen next. In this chart, the Moon has 15 degrees to travel before its next traditional (Ptolemaic) aspect, which is the sextile to Mercury. Fifteen degrees is a long distance to go unaspected. It’s almost like being void of course, in that there’s not much impetus to take any action. This suggested to me that the baby would happily stay put for the full two weeks (15 degrees/15 days), and that the querent would have to be induced. But the nature of that applying sextile bothered me, because it’s between Moon in Mercury’s detriment and Mercury in Moon’s detriment: whatever the Moon was about to encounter, it wouldn’t be good for either party. I concluded that the querent would be better off taking some action before the two weeks had passed.
So that was my judgment: the baby was likely to arrive in a week, and in any case the querent shouldn’t wait the full two weeks before doing something about the situation. I hope everything went well, but I haven’t heard back from the querent. It’s been a month since I studied this chart, and I hope she is busy with her new baby girl by now.
Subscribe to feed
