Why are baby boys worth more than baby girls in some countries?

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Cot death is one of those contentious tragedies that the west struggles to deal with, let alone try and even explain. A child infant death is always terrible and when it’s unexplained in the family home suspicion, at first, often falls on the parents. In the third world some religions and cultures revere boys more than girls and you have a lot more female infant deaths around that. The Indian twisted cultural logic, for example, is that the boy has a higher dowry and so worth more than the girl, yet you need girls to become women to have the baby boys, a real head scratcher. UNICEF estimate there are 10 MILLION fewer Indian girls than there should be in the last twenty years. Something like one-in-four of all portable ultrasound baby scanning machines on Earth are used in India. America has the highest total number of cot deaths per year at around 4,000 whilst Finland has the lowest at less than 100. New Zealand has the highest per-ca-pita due to the high Maori death rates. In the United Kingdom we had very high numbers in the 1970s and 1980s so tried to deal with it, getting the numbers down from the thousands to the hundreds by encouraging various sleeping positions. It was a great thing the country was very proud of. Today it’s below 300 per year, amazing. The problem is no one really knows what kills the babies. Because a lot of the babies that die are in families where the parents smoke they say it could be carcinogenic poisons. Then they said it was chemicals in the cot mattresses, where many of the babies died. In fact Cot deaths are six times more prevalent in families that smoke. But it gets interesting when you look more at the parents of cot death babies than actually pre-existing health of the baby. Boys suffer more cot deaths than girls, 52%48%. There are more cot deaths at weekends and bank holidays than weekdays. 50 more babies died on Saturday and Sunday than they statistically should have in England. Cot deaths often happen when only one parent present. Cot Deaths are essentially a working class tragedy. Single parents are seven times more likely to suffer one, and mothers at a young age. Cot deaths in the Middle Classes are very very rare. If they suffer one then the parent is quickly under suspicion for infanticide because it’s so rare. We have had many famous court cases around that, here. Single moms with low education, drug, depression and alcohol problems are 200 plus of the 320 cases in 2014. 60% of all cot deaths are in non married relationships? A lot of cot deaths are put down to suffocation. Many times parents roll over on top of their baby in the family bed. That ends up in the cot death statistics. Often the mothers are drunk or taking soft drugs when it happens. Others are just unknown deaths but nearly always blocked airwaves that causes suffocation and so the heart stopping. So is the problem really the baby’s health in all of these cases? Statistically that’s unlikely. The odds move to the parents. It’s a much smaller group of parents likely to suffer cot death than we like to acknowledge. In Britain we are too nice around this stuff and it’s better to label everything unexplained when the alternative is uncomfortable.