The Womb Makes It Easy Being A Girl: How The Placenta Protects Girls More Than Boys

In the battle of the sexes, a new study suggests that girls have a natural advantage over boys. Researchers have found that the answer to why women carrying baby girls statistically have easier pregnancies than those carrying baby boys lies in the placenta.

In the study published in Molecular Human Reproduction, it was found that genes produced by the placenta are different in males and females. "We found that with female babies, there is much higher expression of genes involved in placental development, the maintenance of pregnancy, and maternal immune tolerance," said study co-author Sam Buckberry, a graduate student at Adelaide, as reported by HealthDay. It is known that pregnancies are more likely to have bad outcomes if the baby is a boy. This is partly due to the fact that boys grow faster from the moment of conception, and this puts them at a higher risk to lacking nutrition. This is modelled by the observation that the number of boy births fell in contrast to the number of girls during the famine in Holland during WWII.

Why is it harder for baby boys to grow in the womb than baby girls? Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

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