After the long period of struggle to conceive, women are more likely to give birth to a boy.
One year does not make any difference, but according to scientists, the chance of having a boy increases by 4%for each extra year that people try for a pregnancy.
After the long period of struggle to conceive, women are more likely to give birth to a boy.
One year does not make any difference, but according to scientists, the chance of having a boy increases by 4%for each extra year that people try for a pregnancy
The study was published in this week’s British Medical Journal. The authors claim the delay is probably caused by the viscous nature of the woman’s cervical mucus, which the Y chromosome, belonging to boys, is more capable of penetrating.
Dutch scientists examined data from 5283 women who gave birth to single babies between 2001 and 2003. 58% of the 498 women who tried for more than a year before getting pregnant gave birth boys, compared to 51% of boys among the women with shorter delays before conception. 71%of babies born to couples trying for more than 3 years were boys were boys. So, for longer delays, the chance of a baby boy was even higher.
According to the authors from the University of Maastricht, sperm had to penetrate a woman’s cervical mucus to reach the egg. The thickness of the mucus varied between and within women. If a woman had thicker mucus, it would make it more complicated to become pregnant and might also give an advantage to the “male” sperm, which were better swimmers.
However, Gab Kovacs, an Australian fertility expert was sceptical about these results. He is a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash University and national medical director of Monash IVF. He claimed the 51%-58%difference after one year could be a coincidence.
“It’s interesting enough to publish a paper, but … I can’t see it being of any clinical significance,” he said. “To me it’s got a very high yawn factor.”
