Pregnant women control birth to avoid Halloween

Fright night just got a little bit spookier. Pregnant women have their own little trick on Halloween ? they seem able to time the delivery of their baby to avoid giving birth on this day.

Rebecca Levy at Yale School of Public Health and colleagues examined 1.8 million US birth records from 1996 to 2006, and found that birth rates dropped by 11.3 per cent on 31 October, when compared with the two-week window surrounding the date. The significant declines in deliveries on Halloween applied to natural births as well as scheduled caesarean and induced births.

"The study raises the possibility that the assumption underlying the term 'spontaneous birth', namely, that births are outside the control of pregnant women, is erroneous," says Levy. She says a psychological influence over hormonal activity may be at work.

"We know that hormones control birth timing, and mothers do often express a desire to give birth on a certain day," she says. "But the process that allows those thoughts to potentially impact the timing, we don't know." More research is needed, she says, to determine the precise ways that thoughts or desires may affect birthing hormones.

Spooky psychology

Levy suggests that Halloween's associations with death and evil are in direct contrast with the idea of creating life and may subconsciously affect a woman's desire to give birth.

"Halloween can have pretty scary imagery of skeletons, death, devils, monsters," she says. "It's possible that death imagery is particularly salient as people are thinking about birth. [Perhaps] it evokes fear on some level."

A happier birthday

The team also examined birth rates around Valentine's day, traditionally associated with the positive feelings of love. On 14 February, they saw an overall spike of 5?per cent in births compared with the two-week window either side.

These findings mimic a 2003 study in Taiwan that showed increases in scheduled births on auspicious days and decreases on inauspicious days, according to the Chinese lunar calendar.

Journal reference: Social Science & Medicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.07.008

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