Tuesday, December 28, 2010

A Baby Boom After a Disaster? More Like a Baby Bust.












The rumors have been around for decades. After some kind of disaster, either natural or man made, nine months later there is a baby boom. While it would make sense that after a large loss of life, humanity would try to repopulate, it doesn't seem to be true.

While scientists did find that a baby boom did happen in Oklahoma after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, they didn't find any support for the idea that more babies are made after a blizzard. The reason for the four year increase in Okie births is that the bombing made people re-evaluate their lives and decide to have children. The urban myth that a blizzard leads to people having more sex is false because even if people were trapped by a snow storm, they would still have access to birth control.

If anything, there are fewer children born after a disaster. This was found after 9-11. Stress has a strong, negative effect on pregnancies. This was shown in the increase in miscarriages of male fetuses in September 2001. Male fetuses are believed to be sensitive to stress hormones than females. Several natural disasters have shown to create a spike in miscarriages, such as the lower than average number of male birth in Japan after the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

The researchers found that the average number of reported miscarriages for the month of September was 995. For the month of September 2001, the number increased to 1,115. "There's nothing more contagious than emotion. If something bad happens, you have a negative contagion. Having something really bad happen, it strikes me it would resonate through a population," said Dr. Sarah Berga, a professor and chairman of the department of gynecology and obstetrics at the Emory University School of Medicine.

Sources:
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-05-25/health/9.11.miscarriage.bereavement_1_fetuses-miscarriages-stress?_s=PM:HEALTH
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/the-latest-blizzard-baby-boom-and-an-enduring-media-myth/19372077/

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