Broadsheet: Women's Articles, Women's Stories, Women's Blog - Salon.com

Broadsheet: Women's Articles, Women's Stories, Women's Blog - Salon.com:
"Apparently, the Inuit -- the 150,000 or so indigenous peoples that populate the northern regions of Russia, Canada and Greenland -- are giving birth to many more girls than boys. According to scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, some Inuit villages are producing twice as many girls as boys and, in one village studied, only girls have been born in recent years.

It's tempting to imagine global solutions to the sex imbalance such as arranged marriages between Indian boys (from girl-starved regions) and Inuit women, but the implications of this news are too harrowing for absurdist digressions. The baby-girl boom is being blamed on the high levels of estrogen-mimicking, man-made chemicals in Inuit mothers' blood. Scientists found that the higher the amount of chemicals such as PCBs, flame retardants and DDT in an Inuit woman's blood, the fewer boys she gave birth to, suggesting that hormone-mimicking chemicals are triggering sex changes during the first three weeks of pregnancy. It was also discovered that boys who are born in Russian Arctic villages suffer from being underweight and premature."