Quote:
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Originally Posted by Greyfox
Years ago when New York city had a power blackout, births increased 9 months later.
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Having posted that, I decided to check into that claim deeper.
The truth be told it has been established that this is an urban myth.
The NY Times reported it. A researcher several years later debunked it.
Wiki reports:
The myth of the blackout baby boom
A thriving urban legend arose in the wake of the Northeast Blackout of 1965, in which it is told that a peak in the birthrate of the blackout areas was observed nine months after the incident. The origin of the myth is a series of three articles published in August 1966 in the New York Times,[5] in which interviewed doctors told that they had noticed an increased number of births.
The story was debunked in 1970 by J. Richard Udry, a demographer from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who did a careful statistical study that found no increase in the birthrate of the affected areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965
