You Can be Anti-Abortion or Anti-Gay, But Not Both

New research shows that the more male babies a woman has the greater the likelihood she will give birth to a gay baby (gaby for short). This puts conservatives in a tough spot. The only way to reduce the number of future gay men is to start aborting male babies when a woman has too many of them. What are people like Rick Santorum to do? I suspect they would gladly support a woman's right to choose if they thought it would lead to less gabies.

As described this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is the number of boys a boy's mom has already had -- not the number of boys he grows up with -- that best predicts whether that boy will be gay.

The mechanism behind this apparent maternal alchemy remains a mystery. But many scientists suspect that women mount a subtle immune system response against male fetuses that becomes stronger with each male pregnancy, ultimately affecting fetal brains in ways that influence sexual orientation.