Study Indicates Women Delay Birth To Avoid Halloween
Mothers aren’t just afraid of their kids having too much candy on Halloween or the legendary razor blade in the apple routine. Women dislike the holiday so much that pregnant women are able to avoid giving birth on Halloween, although specifically, how that happens is unknown.
We unearthed an old report in which Rebecca Levy at the Yale School of Public Health looked over nearly 2 million US birth records from 1996 to 2006. Birth rates decreased by 11.3 percent on October 31st, in comparison to the 2 weeks on either side.
Of course, this is a statistical decline and could be the result of a great many things, and the birth rates also include induced labor and cesarean births. People would typically not choose to have a major procedure, especially childbirth, on a holiday. Thus adding to the dip in babies born on October 31.
There’s something to be said for the power of the human mind to adjust hormone balances, perhaps to keep a child from being born on a day that is seen as a celebration of darkness and death. Mothers will often desire to give birth on a certain day of the week, and somehow, it often happens the way they want.
It’s difficult to say how much is behind this phenomenon, but human hormones are able to change and adjust with exceeding swiftness. When a moving automobile, no matter the speed, hits you, you’ll experience an insanely large surge of adrenaline.
This isn’t magic, and neither are the lower birth rates on Halloween. The chemicals and reactions in our bodies respond to what’s going on in the world, and a healthy dose of fear could certainly lead to a mother not giving birth on Halloween.
These findings and others indicate that natural childbirth may not be as spontaneous as we thought. Mothers are more in control than even they realize.
