So Many Babies

Back When Baby-Starved Germany Had a Brief Glut

“Not enough babies” is an ongoing story and problem in most rich countries. Germany has long led the way, not producing enough babies to sustain the population. (OK, yes, South Korea has an even worse deficit.) But let me share a contrarian story about when Germany had a glut.

I was a visiting scientist at the Max-Planck Institute in Munich in 1991. It was a fascinating experience in many ways, living in a thriving big city in (to me) a foreign country. I tried to immerse myself in the local culture.

One day in April my wife heard an odd news item. The local news reported that Munich hospitals’ maternity wards were abruptly overwhelmed. All the city’s hospitals were struggling to accommodate a massive surge of births.

You have to understand that in a big city, there are always women giving birth, plenty every day, and the rate at which this happens will stabilize faster in a large city than a small one, for statistical reasons (the “law of large numbers”). That is, the number of new babies each day will be roughly the same day after day wherever one is -- but more the same in a big city than in a small one, where for example someone in a small village having triplets could really throw the day’s tally off the average. Munich is very big and so they had a pretty good idea of how many births to expect each day. Every hospital knew how many birthings to expect, and they planned for that in their facilities, making allowances for random fluctuations that might occasionally produce a few more (or less) than usual.

But this glut was far beyond that. Suddenly all the local facilities were overwhelmed. There weren’t enough spare rooms for all the birthing women. A statistical fluke? It seemed quite unlikely, though anything can happen in terms of random chance. But it was several days in a row. Random chance can occasionally produce an extreme case (that is, a single day with a high number of babies), but a row of extremes is astronomically less plausible. Even weirder, it didn’t seem part of a general trend or peak, but rather a brief abrupt outpouring of new babies.

Someone thought to wonder whether the glut of new babies might have been set in motion by some mass coordinated impregnation-fest, maybe a national orgy of sorts. They counted back nine months, to July 1990, and looked for any suspicious activity.

Was anything going on then that might shed light? Well, yes, it turned out. On July 8, the final game of the world’s greatest sports tournament, the World Cup of football (soccer), had been held in Rome, Italy. The German national team had defeated Argentina, in a tense 1-0 thriller, to capture the world championship. Against all odds, the two teams were the same countries that had met in the previous final world championship final, four years earlier (1986), in which Argentina had defeated the Germans. So it was a kind of revenge, a redemption. That made it feel extra good.

No doubt the German male fans felt a surge of positive masculine power. No doubt the women were happy too. No doubt some alcohol was consumed.

Nine months later, a small baby boom.

We can infer what the German fans did that night — and what they didn’t do.

Sports victories produce a surge of testosterone, the masculine hormone, even in just the fans who watch the game. Winning the World Cup of Soccer is an extremely rare achievement, and so the boost to national pride, positive emotion, and masculine energy rippled through the society. Researcher Jim Dabbs collected testosterone samples from Italian and Brazilian fans before and after their 1994 World Cup final in the Los Angeles Rose Bowl. After Brazil won, their fans surged in testosterone, while that of Italian fans dropped. Dabbs remarked on what it was like being in the stadium after the game. “Even the Brazilian women were taunting the Italian men.”

Probably more Brazilian than Italian babies were conceived that night.