Pregnancy Is Contagious, According To Science
It turns out pregnancy is contagious, which means there’s a scientific reason why every single person in your Facebook feed starts posting sonogram pictures at the same time.
Oh, and according to this study, it’s called the “Fertility Influence.” And there are three main reasons why friends have babies together.
There Are 3 Main Reasons Pregnancy Is Contagious
Social Influence: This is basically the scientific equivalent of FOMO. When women start seeing their friends having babies, they don’t want to be the only one not doing it.
I mean, who wants to be left out of baby yoga?
Read: 5 Weird Pregnancy Symptoms nobody tells you about, but should.
Social Learning: Basically this means “It looks fun.” When a woman sees someone else being a great mom, she figures that she can do it, too
Money: It just makes more sense, money-wise to have a kid at the same time as all your other friends. You can share resources, clothes, babysitting. Everything. It’s much easier to swallow the cost of having kids if you can share the burden with others.
Plus, who wants to buy a whole new wardrobe just for nine months? Sharing maternity clothes is the best.
As much as I want to buy it, I am still skeptical.
Pregnancy is contagious, which means there’s a scientific reason why every single person in your Facebook feed starts posting sonogram pictures at the same time.
I think there’s a massive chance that we just have a tendency to hang out with people at the same place in their lives as we are, because we usually end up being friends with people who are a lot like us.
So, basically that means that, yeah maybe pregnancy is contagious and friends have babies together, but that’s more because like begets like– not because our hormones sync up in a magic baby making party or anything.
Although, maybe pregnancy is contagious. When I was teaching kindergarten, three of us got pregnant all at the same time.
It would be kind of nice to know that science, and not insanity or some weird “sisterhood of the traveling pants” scenario where we all wanted to share the same maternity jeans was behind it.
