WHILE sons are more coveted than daughters in a number of cultures around the world, pregnant women hoping for a son might want to reconsider now that a Finnish study has concluded that giving birth to sons shortens a mother’s life span.
Samuli Helle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Turku in Finland, found while researching historical data that a mother’s life span was on average cut short by 34 weeks for every son to which she gave birth, while it was extended by 23 weeks for every daughter.
”The more sons a mother produced, the shorter her life span, while daughters increased her longevity,” said Helle.
He studied birth and marriage statistics for 375 Sami women — the indigenous population of Lapland — between the 17th and 19th centuries to study how having large families affected the mothers’ life spans.
Even though Helle studied historical data, he said he believed his findings were to some extent still valid for women in modern societies.
While the study found that a mother’s longevity was not related to the number of children she bore, it concluded that the gender of her children did significantly affect her life span.
”One possible explanation for the shortened life span while having boys might be that they are more physically demanding to bear and rear than daughters, since they are larger when born,” Helle said.
He attributed the extended life span for mothers who gave birth to daughters to the fact that daughters were better at helping their mothers in the home, making food and looking after younger children.
The study was published on Friday in the US magazine Science. ? Sapa-AFP