Is there a baby boom going on?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m 2/3 finished with my 3-week trip through southern France, and I’ve never seen so many babies. Every place I look, couples are walking around with babies, ranging from infants to about a year or so, then tapering off with older ones. And strangely, these are virtually all straight caucasians. Only one couple-of-color with a baby and one male couple. And the couples seem to be from all over the place, not just French.

So what’s going on? Has there been a shortage of birth-control pills? A large batch of leaking condoms? A state of war with Muslim immigrants? Is the Cote d’Azur a cure for post-partum depression? What gives?

2

I’m pretty sure this is just a coincidence or sample bias. Isn’t Southern France a pretty popular tourist destination anyway? It’s not surprising if a lot of couples with newborns are visiting. The birth rate in France has been going down for a couple of years and in the U.S., the birth rate decreased a bit when the economy was cratering. It hasn’t changed much since then.

3

The thing is, I’m not seeing many couples with kids older than about 2 through pre-teens. Then I’m seeing lots of teens with each other, not their parents. But the number of babies is way more than I’d expect, and most of them seem to be around 6 months-one year.

4

For what it’s worth, there was a mini baby boom in the US that peaked in 2008:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-07-16-baby-boomlet_N.htm

However, the birth rate dropped dropped strongly since then, perhaps because of the bad economy.

5

Huh. I can name 5 babies that were born at the tail end of 2007.

When I was on vacation back in May, I noticed that almost half of the women in that town were pregnant. I wonder if they were having a convention.

6

If you are seeing that, there may indeed be a baby boom coming!

7

All those straight caucasian couples had their August-in-France trip planned out years ago and then the economy went to shit and they stayed home and had the babies anyway and then said “Shit!, we are still going to go!”

“Get that little fucker a passport!”

8

This week at work we had 31 patients on the floor. 10 were pregnant with twins and one with triplets. That’s a lot of multiples!