Researchers in Finland have found that having a boy, historically speaking, shortens a mother’s life expectancy by a statistically significant amount. Their study, which looked at Finnish villagers in pre-industrial Scandinavia, showed that a woman’s risk of death increased by seven percent per year for each son born. By investigating parish records for individuals in eight parishes who lived during the seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries, “they found that if a woman in these communities was 37 years old at the time of having her last child, her life expectancy would vary depending on the sex of her children.”
