The Day Every Chinese Woman Wants to Give Birth
By Danell Swim
February 27, 2008
Chinese doctors are bracing for a hectic day on Aug. 8. It’s an auspicious day, the long-awaited opening of the Beijing Games, and a day when many of their patients will demand cesarean sections to ensure a lucky birthday for their babies.Hospitals in Beijing are expecting a miniature baby boom on that August day as superstitious parents do everything possible to ensure their infants are born on the opening day of the Olympics, according to doctors quoted yesterday by the Beijing News, a leading newspaper here.
Birth rates will peak on Aug. 8, and hospitals are adding new beds and shortening their minimum stays to cope with the anticipated surge.
The Olympic baby phenomenon shows the continuing grip that numerology, superstition and other traditions have on Chinese life. Even the precise timing of the opening ceremony, at 8:08 p.m. on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008, was chosen because eight is considered lucky.
A growing number of Chinese women are choosing to accept the medical risks of a cesarean section in order to have their babies born on an auspicious day or year. On the advice of their feng shui masters, some women are opting for cesareans up to two months earlier than their due date in order to give birth on a lucky day.
It’s among the leading reasons why China now has one of the world’s highest rates of C-sections, more than 10 times higher than the rate in the 1970s and far above the 15 per cent rate thought reasonable by the World Health Organization.
An astonishing 50 per cent of Chinese births are C-sections, dramatically higher than the average of 5 per cent recorded from the 1950s to the 1970s, according to a report by the Chinese news agency Xinhua.
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