Sex Determination

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 5, Issue 1, 1 July 1926, Page 38

Sex Determination

The present-day parent is tired of haphazard parenthood tired of dipping into the lucky-bag and picking out what comes first to hand. , And just as many of us now ; plan the size of our families scientifically, studying our present responsibilities before embarking on others, so even now we are trying to probe one of Nature's other deep mysterieshow she controls the sex of the children she sends us. A tremendous amount of scientific work is being done on this . subject, and a seeker after knowledge will find at least a hundred ' treatises and books, from which he may turn but little wiser at the end. But certain truths seem to stick ; out from the morass of uncertainty, and everyday experience tell us that perhaps they point the road to truth. It has been found that in the case of both the male and female seeds there arc two kindsone propagating sons and the other daughters. In any particular case, like may join like, definitely producing one sex or the other, or unlikes may clash, the stronger winning. This would fit in with what we know of heredity in general. By the Mendelian Law, which is now generally accepted as truth, one knows that children inherit equally from their parents their mental and physical characteristics, and with such things as the colour of the hair and the general build and temperament, so with sex. Where the conflict occurs one quality is dominant or powerful and the other is recessive ur weak, and according to whether the mother or father is the more powerful, physically and mentally, at the time of conception, so will the sex be determined. The weight of evidence shows that the more powerful mother produces a girl, and conversely. A 11 this goes to show that sex is -^*- determined at the time of conception, but work has been done recently which suggests that in certain circumstances the sex can be modified during the few weeks following.

Now let us consider the conditions which will tend to reduce the strength of the mother, making her the weaker vessel, both at the time of conception and immediately afterwards. Age has a great influence, and we find that if a very young mother of about sixteen or so has a child it is most likely to be a boy, especially if the husband is a good deal older. At the other end of the scale wc find that women having their first child late in life also tend to have boys, while mothers of between twenty and twenty-six, that is, when they are at their best child-bearing-period, are more likely to have a girl. Also, if the husband is considerably older than the wife the family is largely composed of boys. These deductions have been made from many thousands of cases, and so the results may be taken as being true for the normal healthy couple. A nother, and perhaps a more im- -** portant, factor comes into play, and that is, the type and amount of food eaten by the mother and the sort of life she leads. We all know that more boys are born in times of war famine, and trade depression, that is, when conditions are hard and food is scarce. Comfortable conditions and lazy, sedentary lives tend to give us girls. Tables have been drawn up comparing the price of foodstuffs and the male birth-rate, and these were found to rise together, while when prices fell, and living again became more luxurious, girls once more began to be born in excess. In the animal world the same thing holds true. Fur trappers, for instance, find that if trapping is easy and the region fruitful they get a majority of female skins, but in a barren region male skins predominate. It seems strange that Nature, giving with one hand luxurious and easier conditions, should produce the less powerful sexwoman, and that she should of her hardness and austerity make us "mothers of men."