Born under a full moon

According to wikipedia:

Astronomer Daniel Caton analyzed 70,000,000 birth records from the National Center for Health Statistics, and no correlation between births and moon phase was found. Kelly, Rotton, and Culver report that Caton examined 45,000,000 births and found a weak peak around the third quarter phase of the Moon, while the full moon and new moon phases had an average or slightly below average birth rate.

In 1959 Walter and Abraham Menaker reported that a study of over 510,000 births in New York City showed a 1 percent increase in births in the two weeks after full moon. In 1967 Walter Menaker studied another 500,000 births in New York City, and this time he found a 1 percent increase in births in the two-week period centered on the full moon. In 1973 M. Osley, D. Summerville, and L. B. Borst studied another 500,000 births in New York City, and they reported a 1 percent increase in births before the full moon. In 1957 Rippmann analyzed 9,551 births in Danville, PA and found no correlation between the birth rate and the phase of the moon.

Maybe it’s a Belgian thing.

A where site that one can plug in their birthday and find the phase of the moon is here.

Congratulations, Ingrid!

Derek- are you sure that doctors do that for the sake of the clients? I would have guessed they too hoped to take the day off. (I worked in a hospital for a few years and we did try to send as many patients home as possible and didn’t schedule things for holidays when possible, but this was in part so that we _could_ be on low staffing. Most people hoped to take the day off themselves.)

It would be fun to put Mythbusters on the case – but as solving it probably doesn’t involve the use of explosives or falling things, chances are slight.

Re: Name. I see a great movie entitled Plan 9 from the Belgian bureaucracy in the future.

The best of luck to y’all. Whatever your names may be.

What a beautiful and unusual name. Ischa. What is its background?

Hey, my baby was just born on that same full moon, at about 39 weeks 2 days! I choose to go with Ben Clark’s theory above.

That’s a wonderful opening sentence too, sounds straight out of a 1930s short story.

Congratulations!

Perhaps this may be relevant, from Wikipedia [[Menstrual cycle]]:

A 1975 book by Louise Lacey documented the experience of herself and 27 of her friends, who found that when they removed all artificial nightlighting their menstrual cycles began to occur in rhythm with the lunar cycle. She dubbed the technique Lunaception.[22] Later studies in both humans[23] and animals[24] have found that artificial light at night does influence the menstrual cycle in humans and the estrus cycle in mice (cycles are more regular in the absence of artificial light at night), though none have duplicated the synchronization of women’s menstrual cycles with the lunar cycle.

There is a plague of babies upon us. My middle-aged brother has one (Sam, and how sweet he is!), my eldest nephew has one (Jonathan), and his little sister has one in the oven (Oliver?). Everywhere I go I see little tykes and swollen bellies – as though this was somehow a good thing.

Love and congratulations to all.

I couldn’t find any sort of moon phase correlation for my parents, my siblings or their progeny. Certain events seemed to be significant: my sister was born nine months after my parents’ wedding, confounding my mother’s career plans.

(“Inconceivable!” “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”)

Congrats.

My own thought is that special phenomena accompany special people. If the moon was full when he was born, it had everything to do with the moon recognizing his significance, not the other way around.