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At the rate things are going, the last boy in Canada will be born somewhere around the year 7000. The US will keep producing boys only until year 12240. What's going on?

Current trends never extrapolate neatly into the future, but the rate of male births is indeed falling mysteriously in the Western world-- twice as fast in Canada as in the US. So far, the decrease is small-- 51.3 percent of US newborns were boys in 1970, and 51.2 percent in 1990. But over time, a large population leverages small differences-- the drop the male birth rate translates into 38,000 fewer boys born in the US since 1970, and 5,000 fewer in Canada.

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To be sure, more males still are born than females-- nature's apparent compensation for the greater tendency, from birth onward, for males to die. Even more striking is the tendency for boys never to get born in the first place. To maintain the roughly equal balance at birth, it takes some 125 male conceptions per 100 female ones, with the extra males usually quietly miscarrying. Tempting it may be sometimes to crawl back into it, the womb is for males statistically a killing field.

Though generally stronger in body than females, males genetically are unquestionably the weaker sex. With an X and a Y chromosome, those of the guy persuasion lack the luxury of redundancy that a female's two X's afford. For females, if there are faulty instructions on one chromosome, the other can often fill in. For males, that's not always an option, which is why they are prone to a host of genetic conditions-- from hemophilia to color blindness-- rare or nonexistent in the fairer sex.

In addition, males pull themselves up their bootstraps as they form in the womb-- the creation of the penis and other hallmarks of masculinity occurs as the fetal testicles bathe the boy-to-be in male hormones. Fetal masculinization is also having a harder time of it in recent years: epidemiologists note an increase in congenital male reproductive problems-- hypospadias, where the piss hole occurs underside the penis, not the end, and testicles that stay in the abdomen like ovaries, failing to descend into the scrotum.

In itself, there is no problem posed by the fall in the male birthrate, which would have to plummet before it affected the ability of humans to reproduce, males being-- wham bam!-- relatively meager contributors to the process. A falling birthrate, anyway, would be a boon to humanity, not to mention the rest of the planet.

But the decrease in male births could be like the dead canary in a coal mine-- a signal of looming problems otherwise hard to detect. What those problems might be is unclear. Pesticides and pollution are one culprit. After an accident at an Italian chemical plant exposed workers to high concentration of dioxin, their subsequent offspring were female disproportionately by a half. Because they are undergo a process of hormonal transformation, male fetuses are more sensitive to hormone-mimicking or impeding substances. Or maybe exposure to pesticides and other industrial chemicals hinders men's production of Y-chromosome sperm, which, in keeping with theme that maleness is tricky, younger fathers are better at producing.

For the first half of this century, the male birthrate increased in the West, as technological advances helped more difficult pregnancies come successfully to term-- a boost that helped hard-to-be-born males disproportionately. Maybe now the by-products of technological progress are having a counter-male effect. But just because lots of, say, dioxin makes offspring more female doesn't mean that a little does, too.

Another theory suggests that the fall in the male birthrate is benign, simply a result of Westerners having sex less often (well, maybe that's not so benign). A male child is slightly more likely if a woman's egg gets fertilized early in her menstrual cycle. That tendency makes baby booms slight boy booms as well.

The mysterious fall in male birthrate is mysteriously variable geographically-- it has been greatest in Canada's Atlantic provinces and the American Midwest.