MICHIGAN Blackout babies aren't materializing

People are too inconvenienced during a blackout to feel romantic.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DETROIT -- Conventional wisdom says that when the blackout hit the Midwest and Canada nine months ago, two things happened: People were giddy in the dark, and with televisions off, a lot of people in metro Detroit were turning each other on.
The same wisdom also says that hospital maternity wards will soon be flooded with May babies.
Yet hospitals are not seeing or expecting more deliveries. A Duke University professor of sociology and fertility called the blackout baby boom an urban legend. People use contraceptives. Data show that hot temperatures deter people from sex, and in the South, before air-conditioning, fewer babies were born nine months after the hottest month of the year.
Nevertheless, the term "blackout baby" is beginning to spread across the Midwest and beyond.
Many are amused
It's a myth many greet with amusement.
When the lights went out at the Detroit Medical Center, Michael Kam left work and began the maddening, three-hour crawl home to West Bloomfield, Mich. The night was spent searching for batteries, trying to ignore the thick and stifling air and entertaining his uncomfortable 10-month-old son.
Social scientists scoff at the suggestion that powerless nights provoke romance or the sudden urge to conceive.
In fact, S. Philip Morgan, a Duke University professor of sociology specializing in fertility, said the belief that more May babies will be born because of the Aug. 14, 2003, blackout is the stuff of urban legend.
Those prone to believing that more babies are born after natural disasters or national crises also perpetuate the myth that the Nov. 9, 1965, New York blackout produced a baby boom nine months later, Morgan said.
"I'd be shocked to see a baby boom because I'm not convinced there is more sex during blackouts," Morgan said. "Some people are stranded, some people have to work because of the crisis, some feel romantic, but some are freaked out. Some women won't be ovulating. And we do have birth control."
Metro Detroit hospitals confirmed Morgan's suspicions. Though baby wards are typically busy in April and May, they are no more so this year than last.
If metro Detroiters weren't procreating, what were they doing?
"We spent the night not having sex but trying to find a hotel to stay in with our daughter," said Sarah Gothro, 40, of Lake Orion, Mich. "We wound up staying with my in-laws that night. And I wouldn't ever think of having sex at my in-laws' house."
Because they had a generator, Linda Highberg, 54, of Warren, Mich., and her husband spent the blackout doing what they usually do -- watching television.
"We weren't being intimate at all," Highberg said with a snicker. "I wish we were. I'd have remembered that. That would've made it a blackout to remember."