re: Study: Pregnant Smokers Have Girls, Not Boys

Ruyi — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:10:43 GMT

Studies published in New Scientist showed strong evidence that the more unhealthy (and also older) the mother, the more likely they are to have a girl; boy embryos are weaker, one theory, and the other was that a girl is more likely to have and raise a child (thus furthering your genes into one grandchild) while a healthy boy can 'sow oats' and all that stuff (unhealthy mother doesn't have an unhealthy boy to spread his unhealthy genes around). Take or leave the study.

But this could just be another aspect of that. A smoking mother is pretty much going to be of 'low socio-economic status' (as is a lot of Liverpool) and therefore she falls into the unhealthy category in the previous studies.

I always thought it was odd that out of 9 girls in my high school that got pregnant young, lived unhealthy lifestyles and smoked/drank throughout, all had girls. Nine out of nine ain't bad odds, less there's something in our water.

re: Study: Pregnant Smokers Have Girls, Not Boys

ChrisH — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:27:15 GMT

Hm. Now, I have a totally unprovable hypothesis, based on some factoid I heard a while ago (totally unverifiable, so big hunk of salt...) Male fetuses tend to be more delicate than the female variety, so maybe its not a case of smoking changing the sex of babies, and we know that sex is determined by the male gamete (sperm)... so maybe its just that if a mother's body is stressed by having to deal with the shit in cigarettes, the male fetuses just can't handle it and don't make it past the very early stages of pregnancy. OR, nicotine might interfere with that first burst of testosterone that makes male babies male. Hm. Interesting... wish I was a scientitian...

These studies are always a bit bogus, because while they can demonstrate correlation, they have no way of pinpointing causation.