The election of US President Donald Trump seems to have had an unexpected result in Ontario, to say the least: in the months that followed, fewer boys than usual were born in this province, particularly in the counties deemed more progressive.
Year after year, the ratio of births between boys and girls is slightly to the advantage of the former. However, previous studies have already shown that during natural disasters or traumatic events, such as a large-scale terrorist attack, there is a slight drop in the number of boys born three to five months after the event, followed a return to normal.
Based on this finding, Dr. Ravi Retnakaran wondered if the election of President Trump could have had an effect north of the border. To do this, it identified 1,079,758 births registered in Ontario between April 2010 and October 2017, looking for trends in the ratio of boys to girls.
Analyzing the data in the months following the election, the researcher found that the birth ratio had become almost identical between boys and girls in ridings with a large proportion of Liberal and New Democrat voters. In other words, the number of boy births fell in these regions, four months after Trump's election, before returning to normal.
However, the same phenomenon did not occur in ridings more inclined to vote for the Conservatives.
Dr. Retnakaran himself was stunned to find that his hypothesis stood. "Above all, we were surprised to see that the effect is visible in the sectors supporting the Liberals, but not in the conservative regions," he said in a brief statement published by the Mount Sinai hospital, in Toronto, to which the scientist is attached.