Friday, December 29, 2017

Sex ratio changes as women postpone pregnancy

I'll have to do a bit more research on something I uncovered recently. Older women have fewer sons than younger women. That changes the sex ratio of the nation as women postpone pregnancy. "Combining all the years studied, older mothers (40 to 44 years of age and 45 years and over) have the lowest total sex birth ratios (1,038 and 1,039, respectively) and mothers 15 to 19 years of age had the highest sex birth ratio (1,054). (CDC, 2005)"

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201104/why-are-older-parents-more-likely-have-daughters
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr051.pdf
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-10-269

Since women do most of the care taking, perhaps it's God's way to provide career women with someone to take care of them in retirement? When she's 85, daughter xyz will only be 40! Or maybe the sex ratio changed because the latest change began around the time of second wave feminist movement. Another odd thing, if the couple has a son (and now there are fewer), the father is more likely to stick around, whether married or not. If the first child is a girl, the divorce rate is higher than if it's a boy. Little girls may be sugar and spice, but dad wants to play baseball.

Thank goodness my parents' fourth child was a boy, but Mom was 29, not an older mother by today’s standards. He's still adorable, the sweetest brother a girl could have.

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