Better eat your morning Wheaties if you're about to be a parent, because a new study is saying that most U.S. babies are born between 8 a.m. and noon, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Center for Health Statistics, and as reported by TODAY.
The CDC report covered about 90 percent of birth certificate data from 2013, and examined the timing of deliveries, comparing spontaneous labors, induced labors, cesarean sections and out-of-hospital births.
According to Dr. Michael R. Berman, medical director of labor and delivery at New York City's Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, the rise in daytime births is associated with scheduled C-sections, which are largely done in the morning hours. He said the CDC data "can be helpful for the planning of staffing on the labor and delivery floors and in neonatal intensive care units to improve patient safety and optimize outcomes."
MORE: Birth Plan Checklist
Other things the CDC study found include:
- Tuesday was the most common birth day, followed by Monday.
- Births on Saturday and Sunday were more likely to occur in the late evening and early morning hours than births Monday through Friday.
- Babies delivered out of the hospital mostly arrived in the early morning hours, between 1 a.m. and 4:59 a.m—the quietest hours for in-hospital births, which make up 98 percent of all births in the U.S.
Dr. Astrid Jain, an ob-gyn at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, said day shifts are busier, but noted that birthing time doesn't always have "any rhyme or reason to it."
"We almost laugh when we try to plan our day," Jain said. "Because you know the part of the wonderful part of labor of delivery is that there is no plan."
