Forget meat and moons. To give birth to a boy you need a live-in man
Alok Jha, science correspondent
Wednesday October 20, 2004
The Guardian
"The old wives' tale has it that women who want to have sons should eat meat and salty food or make love standing up during a quarter moon. But the real answer for women could be a lot simpler than that: just make sure you are living with your partner.
An American doctor has found that women are more likely to give birth to boys if they are married or living with a man at the time of conception. The results are the first evidence that living arrangements can affect the human sex ratio at birth, and could explain the fall in the number of boy babies in some developed countries in the past 30 years.
"When parents were living together before the birth of one child, that child was 14% more likely to be male than when the parents were not living together before the birth," said Karen Norberg, a clinical associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research in the US and the author of the study. "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1331463,00.html