Get ready for a coronavirus baby boom

We’re stuck at home.

With our partners.

There’s nowhere to go.

And when couples are stuck together at home during big or even stressful events, babies have a way of being made. Researchers have previously found a link between being stuck at home with your partner and getting pregnant.

Motherly’s resident midwife, Diana Spalding CNM, author of our upcoming The Motherly Guide To Becoming Mama: Redefining Your Pregnancy, Birth and Postpartum Journey (available April 14) thinks there are a few reasons for the baby bump.

“It’s probably a few factors: The first being that people who may operate on different schedules, and therefore not see each other as often as they’d like to, are suddenly spending a lot more time together—more time together means more opportunities to make a baby,” Spalding explains. (Psst, if this is you, you might want to pop a prenatal vitamin).

“And the second is that during periods of stress and uncertainty, we tend to seek out comfort and connection with people we love,” Spalding says. “One of the many ways to connect with someone is, of course, to have sex with them.”

The most comprehensive research ever done was a 2008 study by researchers at BYU, which found that certain kind of catastrophic events—like blackouts and snowstorms—do in fact lead to an increase in conception and subsequent birth rates.

Here’s how BYU’s Richard Evans explained it in to NPR’s Michele Martin in a 2016 interview: “[The fertility affect] is that with low-level, low severity events, we found an uptick in births…it sets the table for romance.”

Inversely, with a very dangerous storm, where people literally have to “run for their lives,” there is a similar decrease in pregnancy and births nine months later.

A NJ.com article also noted a correlation between scary events and an increase in births nine months later: “A study done in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City terrorist bombing found an increase in births nine months after the tragedy. Researchers speculated it could have been because people living near the bombing site sensed their own mortality and naturally responded by trying to strengthen their own families.”

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