Why are so many babies born around 8AM? | Hacker News Reader

Why are so many babies born around 8AM?

blogs.scientificamerican.com

62 pointspaladin31415915 comments

TL;DR - Planned C-Sections. There's also a drop on weekends for the same reason as fewer individuals plan for a delivery on the weekends as hospitals are staffed with fewer people.

I thought the same thing when I saw the title.

I've seen similar patters before. I assume the famous "things break on weekends" is because of somethings similar, ex. because there are fewer people to look for and fix small problems before they become bigger and make things fail.

I have four kids and watched all the births. I can assure you that in most cases, the nurses manipulate the timing, even with natural births, so that they allow the doctor to come at around 7h30. Of course there are many exceptions.

I think it makes sense, though.

I also never publish websites on Friday, although for some reason most of my clients want to start the weekend knowing that they're done with it and always beg me to do it.

You just want to play safe and make sure if something can go wrong you're ready to deal with it—in this case by having doctors around rather than being 3AM and the hospital is half empty.

When I saw the headline, I immediately thought "it's because of C-Sections." A few pretty graphs and thousands of filler words later, I discovered that — SURPRISE – it's due to C-Sections!

Data visualization of the bleeding obvious that anyone who gave it a moment's thought would have been able to guess.

I always wondered if you could change birth times simply by changing tee times... ;-)

Most of these planned cases are scheduled to start at 7:30, and the procedure might actually start at 7:40, and then baby comes out around 8.

There's a similar demographic wiggle in France around May 1: very few born on the 1st more born on April 30th. Why? Everybody takes may 1 holiday and the hospital will induce to get the kid out before the holiday.

(My kid's due date was 1 May so we were advised to make plans. As it happens we were in a different country when he arrived so didn't have to see this process in action, but the predictions were accurate).

7 am shift change. Unless you are my mon who had me at 11:30 pm.

They are not. New shift shows up at 8am, and enters birth of date, as 8am, because night shift forgot it ;)

There is no need to remember, you write it down.

Doesn't always happen immediately.

In fact in the developing world (but also in the first world, not so long ago) a child could be registered months or even years after being born, and even the date of birth could be misremembered in the certificate.

Plenty of places in the developing world simply don't record birth dates. When these people need official documentation (e.g. World Cup or Olympic athletes), they'll record either January 1st or July 1st depending on which season they were born in.

But then, wouldn't we see the same pattern for every shift? As a matter of fact, there are dips at 16 and 20h and no discernible change at 0h.

Night shift can't forget and leave the data to day shift to enter. That is fraud. It is not allowed.

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