Most babies in the United States are born in the morning, during regular business hours, according to a report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gathering birth certificates across 41 states and the District of Columbia, the CDC compiled data on birth times in 2013 and found that 90 percent of babies in the country were born during the day. One of the primary reasons this is so may be because cesarean sections are generally scheduled within the morning and midday hours, hinting at the role medical intervention plays at determining birth times.
If births are equally distributed throughout the day, around 4.2 percent of babies will be born at every hour in a single day. However, as majority of births occur between 8 a.m. and 5:59 p.m., the figures rise to 6.3 and 6 percent respectively for 8 a.m. and noon.
Take note, though, that these numbers generally represent weekday births. During weekends, births are likelier to occur in the early morning and late evening hours.
In 2013, there were about 3.9 million births in the U.S. Out of these, over 98 percent are hospital deliveries, which can be classified into four categories: planned cesareans, unplanned cesareans, induced vaginal births and non-induced vaginal births.
Planned cesareans were scheduled mostly during the day compared with unplanned cesareans, while non-induced vaginal births usually happen in the early morning and evening. Overall, however, induced vaginal births peak in the middle of the afternoon, declining after 6 p.m.
As for home births, babies have a tendency to come during the early morning hours, decreasing until noon. There's a bit of a spike in births after the lunch hour, but significant increases don't begin until around 3 p.m. This trend may be a more accurate portrayal of natural delivery patterns, however, because fewer interventions affect births.
As the data only represents 90 percent of births in the country, the CDC warned that the report is not a complete reflection of birth times in the U.S. A more accurate report should be released once time-of-birth data becomes more readily available in 2016. Hospitals didn't provide time-of-birth information until recently, so it is unknown if birth-time trends have shifted over the years.
The CDC report was authored by TJ Matthews, M.S. and Sally Curtin, M.A. They used information from the Natality Data File entered into the National Vital Statistics System.
Photo: Hebe Aguilera | Flickr
