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Why are so many babies born around 8:00 AM? (2017)
- eddof13 4y agoI was going to guess without reading the article that it has to do with Drs etc arriving at work at 8am and mothers waiting until they arrive to have the baby extracted- seems about right
- nvdnadj92 4y agoNeat -- I was born on a tuesday in September at 8:16AM.
- gumby 4y agoMy son's due date was May 1 but in France basically no kids are born on that date; they'll induce a day or so before. Allegedly this is because so many people are on vacation it's not really a safe day to have an emergency. I am not convinced by that "explanation".
- pyuser583 4y agoMy daughter was born around 8am. The midwife attended from around 7pm the night before. She suggested getting a good nights sleep. Natural births aren’t random. They are the result of lots of pushing and a little pulling. Getting a good nights sleep is a good idea. I can’t believe this is even a question. Edit: My wife corrected me on this. She claims she didn’t sleep the night before, but I’m about 70% certain she nodded off quite a bit.
- jo6gwb 4y agoArticle is from 2017.
- totoglazer 4y agoAnd the data is from 2014.
- uptown 4y agoYes, but 8:00am in 2017.
- baud147258 4y agobut with inflation, 8:00 am in 2017 is now 7:30 am
- adolph 4y agoWhat time zone?
- utopcell 4y agoTl;Dr: ~30% of births are C-section, and hospitals prefer early morning operations.
- francisofascii 4y agoAdditionally, ~18% percent are induced labors resulting in more daytime births.
- raldi 4y agoThank you.
- buscoquadnary 4y agoJust had baby Dr wanted to do it at 7:00 and the hospital required us to be there at 5:00am. Dr showed up half an hour late. The reason he scheduled for then was so he could still do office hours. His office closes at noon. Don't like the guy.
- devilbunny 4y agoYou have to register with the hospital. You have to change into a hospital gown. You have to get an IV and labs (which take an hour to come back). You have to do a nursing intake interview (which is surprisingly long). I'm an anesthesiologist. My wife needed surgery. And the surgeon is a friend of mine from childhood and needed to leave that afternoon. We had a free OR. Even then, it took 2.5 hrs to get her registered, up to the surgical floor, and to the OR. So, maybe that doctor is a jerk, but realistically, it takes a while even if you have the inside track on everything.
- aliqot 4y agoFile a grievance with a regulatory body.
- buscoquadnary 4y agoThe amount of effort to file a grievance against the guy because he was late seems a little extreme. Especially since I haven't slept in 5 days now because of the aforementioned beby. Although it was incredibly telling when I asked the nurse. "Hey so I know nurses have a list of which Drs. Are a-holes and which ones are good to work with, is our Dr an a-hole?" She responded by saying she couldn't answer that one way or another.
- exhilaration 4y agoThe answer is scheduled C-sections and if you haven't read it, Atul Gawande's 2006 New Yorker article on why they've become so common is good read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score After watching The Business of Being Born, Gawande's article was really helpful in understanding why things are done the way they are.
- top_kekeroni_m8 4y agoGreat article, thanks for sharing. Reading this while my wife is in week 40 of the pregnancy..
- public_defender 4y agoThe practice of routinely scheduling a c-section is basically a confession that birth medicine doesn't serve the patient. Any reasonable medical system would allow natural birth to progress until medical intervention became necessary.
- voz_ 4y agoAbsolutely incorrect take. Also, irresponsible to spread this kind of nonsense when you are a public defender, and not remotely close to being a medical professional.
- ezekg 4y agoYou can only have an opinion on the ridiculous prevalence of c-section deliveries if you’re a medical processional?
- pc86 4y agoNo, but this opinion is demonstrably wrong. Read any of the ACOG literature, there are dozens of peer-reviewed studies about the safety and efficacy of induction, assisted deliveries like vacuums, and both scheduled and emergency c-sections. Scheduled c-sections outperform emergency c-sections in every metric tracked. Scheduled c-sections are no worse for the baby than natural delivery, and if you take into account recovery time from surgery, no worse for the mother. You can have an opinion on whatever you like, but to be blunt, if it's as stupid as this one you should get called out for it.
- ZacharyPitts 4y agoAlso related and shown in the diagrams in the linked article, why are so many babies born on Friday, and less on Saturday? Doctors/nurses want their weekends too, so inducements / c-sections also go up on Fridays. Says the dad of the child born at 4pm on a Friday...
- tylergetsay 4y agoI wonder if this is correlated at all with the fact that ERs are much busier on the weekend
- Xeoncross 4y agoAn unfortunate side effect of the US hospital business is that you have a large number of customers and have to push people through the system as quickly as you can. That's probably why there has been such an increase in birth centers for mothers who want the time to go through labor naturally.
- blfr 4y agoNah, in completely socialized systems doctors and nurses also usually want to have weekends and evenings off, hospitals aren't staffed as well as during business hours, and people try to limit the workload on their colleagues remaining on duty.
- mahogany 4y agoThe contrast to "the US hospital business" is not necessarily "socialized systems". A better contrast is, as the original commenter pointed out, birthing centers (or home births). A contrast to a hospital OBGYN in the US is a certified nurse midwife.
- bombcar 4y agoEven midwife systems often end up with a "ball of midwives" where you may not even know who you're going to get, and then they go off the clock at 6 PM and someone new steps in. Everything is a cost/benefit/availability tradeoff, and time is just one of the many variables that are being juggled. Of course, if you have money to throw at the problem you can reduce the other issues.
- NDizzle 4y agoI would guess it's coffee related. Let's get this over with so I can have my coffee.
- cookieswumchorr 4y agomy first guess was that's when the paperwork for the night shift is done :)
- rongopo 4y agoCos new nurse teams arrive with coffee in blood. Seen it.
- jeffbee 4y agoI witnessed this phenomenon first-hand when my second child was born and during the labor, which was not exceptionally long, only 7 hours, the doctor started making "this is not progressing" noises toward 5pm and I had to sternly tell him to fuck right off. Based on a strip chart of the time between contractions the labor was clearly making normal, bordering on rapid, progress. Doctors are pretty much dicks, and the entire American system is massively broken.
- sunjester 4y agoIt's all about the Benjamin's
- jerf 4y agoThis is a good example of how in the real world, everything is correlated with everything. Understanding this principle, I would expect uneven birth times and birth dates. I may not be able to guess what will cause it to be uneven (though in this particular case I would have gotten pretty close), or by how much it will deviate from uniformly random (I would have gotten this wrong to the low side), but it's sure to be something. To put it another way intuitively, in a complicated world with so many things impacting so many other things, to have a totally uniformly random birth times or dates would essentially require some active force to smooth the times and dates out, because it is beyond implausible that absolutely nothing would have an impact. From diurnal hormone cycles, traffic cycles, preferences about surgery times, and probably another dozen things you could think of that could impact the times, it is implausible to expect that they would all be completely wrong or that they would all precisely cancel. Uniform randomness is a very convenient mathematical fiction for making Statistics 101 problems easy enough for students to do. This is a necessary thing and it's hard to imagine how to avoid it. But in reality almost nothing is ever truly uniformly random. There's always something out there that's going to correlate it with something. It is a sad side effect of this need to simplify problems enough to be tractable by students that we end up teaching that uniform randomness is somehow the "default" distribution and the others are exceptions or something.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 4y agoIf the medical staff influence the delivery time, they in turn are influenced by everything else, like vendors and traffic accidents. While obstetricians are not fungible with trauma surgeons, and nurses are only slightly more fungible (because they tend to work in a particular ward), they all have to deal with the pharmacy and anesthesiology, etc. I don’t know if they share surgical theaters, but you can’t reuse a surgery until it is clean and functioning, I think those crews would definitely be floating. I don’t know much of anything about the other people in the OR, if the assistants stick to a particular group of surgeons or float. The people handling tools and gauze pads (which sounds like a dumb job but someone has to be sure that 12 pads and a clamp went into your abdomen and exactly that number came back out at the end), clamps, retraction, suction, IV and gas monitoring, etc etc. Those are somewhat specialized to the task but I don’t know if they are specialized to a surgical unit or if the same people who help with a appendectomy also assist with a finger reattachment or spinal surgery. If they do a surgery could get bumped for scheduling conflicts, or shift changes.
- shiftpgdn 4y agoHow labor and delivery doctors treat women is criminal. A hospital should not be a butcher shop.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoYou mean a generally-recommended-as-medically-necessary-only procedure that would result in far more complications were it not performed? And anyway, people get surgeries all the time, how is this any different?
- mahogany 4y ago> You mean a generally-recommended-as-medically-necessary-only procedure that would result in far more complications were it not performed? A Caesarean is often performed even when it is not medically necessary. Hence "why are so many babies born around 8:00 AM"? Additionally, above a certain rate in industrialized countries, they are not even associated with better birth outcomes. > And anyway, people get surgeries all the time, how is this any different? Because childbirth is not an injury or deformity that requires fixing (or any intervention) in the large majority of cases. Surgery should be done when medically necessary. A Caesarean has many potential side effects for the mother and the infant, and doing it just to hurry things up is (IMO) unethical.
- aaomidi 4y agoWhy should this decision not be left up to the mother? Why is this unethical?
- mahogany 4y agoWhat leads to many Caesareans is the "cascade of interventions" which might include unnecessary induced labor (e.g. if a mother is not dilating "quickly enough"), an early epidural, or continuous EFM. Many of these interventions, including the ones I listed, increase the likelihood of having a Caesarean. In such a highly emotional situation, many mothers will feel pressured to do what their medical provider recommends. So, yes, it's technically true that it's the mother's decision, but many mothers don't realize they have the right to refuse these interventions, or are too scared to advocate for themselves in these situations, or are not fully aware of the risks -- both to the mother and the baby. In that sense, the decision is largely made by the medical provider, and this decision is often made because of an unnecessary urgency to get the birth done (or other reasons, such as a lack of experience with vaginal births or a fear of being sued, but in any case these reasons are not primarily the mother's). That is the part I was referring to as unethical. To be clear, if it is medically necessary, a Caesarean should absolutely be done.