Economy Not Nearly Good Enough To Take Credit For Everyone Getting Knocked Up Circa Sandy

Only your raw sexual magnetism/the lack of cable/light/food can do that.

Late last October, Hurricane Sandy pumped six feet of water into the lobby of a residential building in downtown Jersey City, trapping Meaghan B Murphy and her husband, Patrick, in their apartment and leaving them without electricity for days. Ms. Murphy, 37, deputy editor of Self magazine, is expected to give birth to her third child at the end of July. “We were content with two children; three were not in the plan,” she recalled. “But with no power, no TV, no lights, even without that much food, there was not much else to do.” “And my husband is so handsome,” she added of Mr. Murphy, a 33-year-old private client manager for a bank. “I couldn’t resist.” Call it Sandy Syndrome. Several New York hospitals are bracing for an increase in births during the last weeks of July and early August. That would be about nine months after power failures and floods caused by Hurricane Sandy paralyzed large swaths of the New York metropolitan area and kept couples at home.

“There’s definitely an uptick,” said Dr. Jacques Moritz, director of the division of gynecology at St Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. “This is just old basic physiology. There’s no Internet and no cable. What else is there to do?’ Some doctors, while acknowledging the increase in the number of anticipated births, are reluctant to immediately make a correlation between the storm and the expected blip in the birthrate. “Obviously, people are talking about ‘Sandy babies,’ ” Dr. Grunebaum said. If there is an increase, it could be attributable to other factors, including an improving economy. Still, Dr. Moritz said, “I don’t think the economy has gotten good enough to say that last October people were deciding to have babies.”

Preparing For Hurricane Babies [NYT]