The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Not Having Male Heirs

I came across an interesting article about how the gender of a baby might be influenced by stress:

http://ca.shine.yahoo.com/stressed--you-may-be-having-a-girl.html

That got me thinking: there are cultures out there that put a lot of pressure on women to give birth to boys. Sometimes, a woman is not treated as a full-fledged member of a family unless she becomes mother to a male child. In the movie Ju Dou, the husband was beating the wife up for not producing an heir, and he told her (paraphrase): “Give me a son, and I’ll treat you like a queen.”

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the very pressure that is put on these poor women is the reason why fewer precious boy-children are born? Hey, it was only a preliminary study, but it got me thinking.