Abstract
The concentration of births on working days compared to a relative lack of events at weekends or during public holidays has been interpreted in literature as evidence of an excessive appeal to elective delivery. The World Health Organization has repeatedly expressed concerns about the abuse of this practice. We investigate the daily distribution of births in Italy in the period 1999–2016 to answer the following question: In addition to the weekend effects found in other countries, do popular beliefs about “unlucky” days also influence the calendar of births?We assume that without the effects exerted by the working calendar and/or by popular beliefs, the births should be equally distributed between the days of a month. We interpret the equal distribution as the expected one. This allows us to calculate a daily excess of births with respect to the expected number. We evaluate, by the means of multivariate regression, the impact of public holidays and of popular beliefs on the daily excess of births. In addition to working calendar effects, we found a depressing effect exerted by the 17th day of each month in all Italian territories. Indeed, the number 17 is considered extremely unlucky by popular tradition in Italy. We believe that these findings are indicative of a systemic abuse of elective delivery, especially in Southern Italy. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to analyze the effect of irrational beliefs on the calendar of births.
Highlights
In the decades preceding World War II, a commission of the International Institute of Statistics revealed that the birthdate of newborns was artificially modified in various countries
The concentration of births on working days compared to a relative lack of events at weekends or during public holidays has been interpreted in literature as evidence of an excessive appeal to elective delivery
We investigate the daily distribution of births in Italy in the period 1999–2016 to answer the following question: In addition to the weekend effects found in other countries, do popular beliefs about “unlucky” days influence the calendar of births? We assume that without the effects exerted by the working calendar and/or by popular beliefs, the births should be distributed between the days of a month
Summary
Reluctance to report the correct date for those born on certain days of the week (Fig. 1), and on Friday, a day considered ominous in popular tradition (see Breschi & Ruiu, 2016), was evident; Monday was the most frequent day of birth, and this was likely due to the fact that, especially in rural and mountain communities, the registry office was closed at the weekend (Gini et al, 1954) Another huge reduction in the number of births was evident on the 17th day of each month, and the number 17 is considered unlucky in Italy (see Breschi & Ruiu, 2016); a similar effect was exerted by All Souls’ Day (which falls on the 2 November). In Italy, the use of this practice has been defined as “excessive” by the same Ministero della salute, 2017 (p.6): 35% of the births that occurred in 2014 were, conducted by caesarean section This is almost three times higher than the figure considered ideal by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2015). We will discuss the results, while the last section is devoted to final considerations
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