Mothers More Likely to Try to Have Babies in Spring and Summer

When trying to conceive your children, did you try to time it so they would be born during spring and summer?

Researchers believe that mothers are deliberately trying to give birth during these seasons when newborn health is at its highest.

The paper Choosing Season of Birth: The Role of Biological and Economic Constraints found that in the southern hemisphere, we have more births in December to March and fewer in May to August.

While in the northern hemisphere, fewer babies are born between November and March, with more born between June and September – their winter and summer months respectively.

The findings were carried out by scientists from universities in Chile and the United Kingdom, and presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference in Brighton in the UK.

Report co-author, Dr Climent Quintana-Domeque, from Oxford University said: “For the first time, our research documents that season of birth is actually a planned decision: mothers have a clear desire to target the ‘good’ seasons of birth of spring and summer and often manage to do so.”

The researchers said young women respond “very clearly” to bad weather, and in the states in the USA where winters are most extreme, young women were almost eight per cent more likely to have a summer birth. Although for older first-time mothers, aged 40 and above, the likelihood of giving birth in either summer or winter was around the same.
They also found that a woman’s job could affect when she planned to give birth, with women working in education targeting spring and summer births when they have longer holidays and lesser workloads compared to winter and autumn.

Studies have shown that babies born in autumn and winter are more likely to develop food allergies, but scientists are yet to be able to explain why. Asthma is more common in autumn-born children.