day no. 14,462: sugar, spice and twice as nice

Leviticus 12

In my personal experience in having 3 boys and 3 girls, this holds true. Girls are more difficult to recover from bearing then boys. My wife takes longer to bounce back both physically and emotionally from growing and birthing a baby girl. The time period assigned to this recovery is 40 days for boys and double that, 80 days, for girls. 40 is almost exclusively used synonymous with testing or trial in the Bible and the testing period of bringing a boy into this world is here assigned half the time that bringing a girl into the world requires. Some may from the outside looking in see this as discriminatory and it is, in the sense, that a clear distinction based entirely on gender is being made. If that is your accusation, then guilty is the plea. But what some may miss or choose to overlook is the period of recovery given to the new mother of a baby girl who is now allowed to recover twice as long without the usual obligations associated with "normal" non-recovering-from-labor-and-delivery life.