Years back my mum told me stories of how she and her bestie got pregnant same time at different period and gave birth to their children almost at same or with intervals of 2-3 weeks. I was amazed and wondered if it was science, spiritual or a mere coincidence. 

Not until recently, I realized through various research that having pregnant people around you can increase your risk of becoming pregnant too.

Now, that’s fascinating!

This news can be positive or negative depending on your attainment or position in life.

According to a 2014 American study, pregnancy can be contagious among women in the same social circle. The chances of getting pregnant when you bestie is pregnant is also very high.

THE STUDY

Researchers’ analysed data of 1,720 women who participated in the study called the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. In the United States from mid-90s to mid-2000s, female participants who were at least 15 years old in 1995 were tracked through home interviews for the following 10 years.

During that 10 years, the researchers saw that nearly half of the women had a child by the time the final interview was conducted in either 2008 or 2009.

And during those interviews, researchers found out that the women had up to 10 “friendship ties” which tipped the researchers off that there might be a pattern among groups of friends as they got older.

Researchers looked specifically on the pairs that had high school friends through later years and found that yeah, that group of friends has a strong “contagion” for planned pregnancies.

“We found this effect to be short-term and inverse U-shaped: an individual’s risk of childbearing starts increasing after a friend’s childbearing, reaches a peak around two years later, then decrease,” the researchers noted.

THE CAUSE

According to the study, this pattern is what they call the “fertility influence” and the researchers tried to narrow it down exactly what was going on and why this happens.

• Social learning: This is the theory that women are more likely to decide on motherhood themselves when they see a close friend do it successfully.
• Social influence: Ladies don’t want to be “left behind” if their friends are moving on to this phase of their life.
• And the third is what the researchers are calling cost-sharing. They say that there are some financial perks between friends if they can coordinate childcare and activities.

Well! if you don’t know, now you know.

More Evidence

At an elementary school in Kansas nearly half the teachers are pregnant or have just had babies. The school posted a photo of the 7 mamas-to-be on Facebook.

WOW! Interesting…