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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The media has generally argued that the 9/11 baby boom is a done deal. Most stories written about the alleged phenomenon have chosen to spread the rumor as if it were true. Some editors and writers have used headlines like "Out of terror, come bundles of joy," (from the Philadelphia Daily News) or "Baby boom in terror wake" (from London's The Mirror) to get the point across. Others, like the Washington Post, simply relied on Cohan and her Hurricane Hugo study.
To those who have been watching baby booms for years, the attention and the sloppy approach look familiar. Several other events, from hurricanes to blizzards to strikes by professional athletes, have spawned similar media reactions. And while birth statistics -- which come out after the stories -- typically debunk the sentimental speculation about a baby boom, few column inches or TV minutes are dedicated to setting the record straight. The myths are generally left intact; they course continuously through the culture.
The best example of this hype-infested pattern lies with the most enduring alleged baby boom of the past 50 years -- the "blackout baby boom" of the mid '60s. This pearl of a story, like the supposed baby boom of Sept. 11, centers on a one-day event in New York's history -- Nov. 9, 1965. On this day, starting at rush hour, New York and several other northeast cities lost electricity for 10 hours -- more than enough time for bored or creative or sex-starved couples to conceive. And according to a series of three August 1966 articles in the New York Times -- which reported a larger-than-average number of births at several area hospitals nine months after the blackout -- that's exactly what people did.
Except that they didn't.
A comprehensive study done in 1970 by J. Richard Udry, a respected University of North Carolina demographer, revealed that the blackout caused no increase in the affected area's birthrate. The New York Times' reliance on doctors' accounts -- "it's not unreasonable to assume that a lot of sex life went on" quipped one physician -- proved hollow. What Udry found was that the doctors' perceived boom was a localized deviation, not a reflection of the national, or even regional, birthrate.
And yet, despite the efforts of Haaga, Udry and others, the myth of the "blackout baby boom" continues to thrive. It's been more than 30 years since Udry's landmark study was published in the journal Demography. Other reports like "Babies and the Blackout: The Genesis of a Misconception" (from the September 1981 issue of Social Science Research) have confirmed Udry's findings. But, as the New York Times noted April 7, 2002, "doctors and nurses still exchange stories of past baby boomlets after citywide blackouts, blizzards and earthquakes." Some sociologists continue to cite the blackout boom as fact rather than fiction.
Will the alleged baby boom related to Sept. 11 also be debunked, only to remain in circulation? Or, if a boom does occur, how will it be explained? Will it be the result of gradual demographic changes or a flurry of terrorism-inspired conception?
The definitive answers to these questions won't appear for several months -- or years. But in the meantime, Cohan, for one, stands firm in the belief that at least the areas most affected by the terrorist attacks will experience a pronounced birthing bump. There's a link, she argues, between births and geographical proximity to disaster.
"In the Hurricane Hugo study, we found an increase in births in the eastern half of South Carolina that was declared a federal disaster site, but not in the western half of the state that was not so affected," she says. "It's my hunch that there will be an increase in births in New York City and Washington, D.C."
A rise in the national birthrate, Cohan argues, is less likely because those who live miles away from the disaster site suffered no disruption of their daily lives. But, she maintains, a national boom is not outside the realm of possibility. Other factors, like emotional proximity -- feeling close to the event in mind rather than body -- could make the boom national. "If an increase in births is related to feeling as though one's life was threatened by the event, then we might see an increase in births elsewhere," she says.
