Birth trends and the lunar connection for Lund’s community 1995-2004

Sammanfattning: ‘Birth trends and the lunar connection for Lund’s community 1994-2005’ analyses natural births using statistical methods. With the aid of different time series models a pattern was found, namely that most natural births occur during the spring months and the smallest number occur during the month of November. An explanation for this could be that many people take vacation during the summer months, which gives them more time to reproduce during these months. The original idea behind this study was to examine if there was some proof behind the myth that the Full Moon influences women to go into labor. The objective with the study was to find a pattern between natural births in Lund's municipality during the period 1994-2005 and the Moon's phases. No connection could be established between natural births and the Moon's phases, neither for the Moon's four or eight phases. The analysis of the Moon's phases produced no significant differences in the phases, which means that there is more or less the same number of births during each phase. It would be more logical to consider the synodic period, which is one day on the Moon or the equivalent of 29.53 earth days. A suggestion then for future studies would be to see if a pattern could be established between births and an average synodic period.