The full-moon-baby-boom phenomenon
My “twin” sister (she is not really my sister but we are both the same age, to the day) is about to have a baby and I’m dead excited. She is due any day now, on a full-moon. Apparently having a baby on a full moon if very common, extra staff are drafted in to maternity wards, just ask any baby-related professional, babies are born more frequently on a full moon.
“Nonsense!” is my immediate gut response… however, partly because I am a pedant but mainly because I am actually very intrigued by the idea, I have looked into the full-moon-baby-boom phenomenon.
You see, while I don’t buy the moon’s gravitational pull on the baby/mother idea one bit, women’s menstrual cycle cycles every month and so does the moon, so while there may not be a relationship, maybe there is something interesting in it. After all, it is a common idea actually held by many health professionals, midwives and obstetricians… so there has to be some truth in it, right?
Well humans are notoriously good at finding patterns where there are none, in fact our brains are hard wired to do this, it is one way we try to make sense of a bewilderingly complicated world and data overload from our senses. Humans are notoriously fallible, even the history of science is littered with examples of scientist using their intuition, rather than the data, and discovering amazing things which later turned out to be completely untrue.
Well this full-moon-baby-boom thing should be very easy to check; it does not require complicated, and maybe not so easy to understand experiments, it is a very simple matter of collecting some statistics; how many babies were born when and what was the phase of the moon at the time, then just draw a graph of the number of babies born over time, compare this to the moon’s cycle and look to see if there is a correlation.
As I suspected this has been done before, several times in fact. For example the article below cites five separate studies all of which came up with a negative; I am sorry to say there is no measurable correlation between the phase of the moon and the human birth rate.
http://bayblab.blogspot.com/2007/09/fact-or-fiction-full-moon-baby-boom.html
And this is an excellent article about other supposed moon/human phenomenon:
