“What theological objections could the pope himself raise to a birth-control method that simply permitted parents to choose a son in preference to a daughter? After all, God did,” reasoned Clare Boothe Luce, a playwright and U.S. congresswoman, in an article published in the Washington Star in 1978, promoting the use of a hypothetical “man-child pill” that would control population growth by ensuring the birth of a boy.

When the seventh-century Japanese prince Shōtoku was having his tomb built, he told the laborers, “Cut here, trim there—I wish for no descendants.”

Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus, received the prize for tragedy at the dramatic festival the year that Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex. None of his one hundred or so plays is extant.

While aboard a ship on which a fire broke out, Ivan Turgenev as a boy in 1838 is purported to have shouted in alarm, “Save me, save me, I am my mother’s only son.”