The Secret Tip to Getting Pregnant?

May 8, 2010— -- When all else fails, some turn to superstitions. So this Mother's Day, the folks at Ripley's Believe It or Not! are touting one of the strangest customs some women have tried to become pregnant -- and it has nothing to do with the birds and the bees.

On the eve of Mother's Day weekend -- with a big helping of skepticism on the side -- we bring you the fertility statues.

These five-foot tall wooden figures, housed in the Ripley's "odditorium" in New York's Times Square, are said to help bring about pregnancy to anybody who rubs their stomachs.

Who says so? Well, OK, so it's not a doctor or fancy fertility clinic.

Ripley's has a collection of these figures at its various odditoriums museum. In the late 1990s, the statues went on a three-year tour. (The fertility statues are back on tour again this year.) After the tour, the company said it received more than 2,000 letters from women who became pregnant shortly after touching the statues -- even though many had been told by doctors they would never conceive.

Hard to believe? Maybe. But with infertility affecting about 7.3 million women and their partners in the U.S. -- about 12 percent of the reproductive-age population -- many people are willing to try anything.

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"The most important desire in most people's life is to have a child, a link between their past and the future, in a sense," said Dr. Sherman J. Silber, director or the Infertility Center of St. Louis at St. Luke's Hospital. "So since the beginning of mankind there have been fertility icons, idol worship if you will, grasping at any straw that might help in this devastating dilemma."

Today people buy all types of worthless and non-FDA approved "nutritional supplements," Silber said. Or they try operations and "male enhancement formulas." Silber said all of these are "no more effective than these fertility statues."

"The joke is sometimes they seem to work and some will swear by them," Silber said. "That is because even infertility patients will sometimes get pregnant without any treatment at all, not even by rubbing a fertility statue. In fact that is why even 4,000 years ago idol worship also seemed to work."