Last week, New York City and much of the East Coast was hit but a huge storm. While it wasn’t catastrophic or even historic, the storm was powerful enough that most people stayed in Wednesday night to avoid the cold and dangerous travel conditions. And when a lot of people stay home to stay warm, a reasonable person would assume the majority of, or at least a significant number, of those people would take the chance to partner up with someone and have sex—after all, what else are you supposed to do when snowed in? But does the science back up this reasonable assumption?
-
Related Story: 8 Questions to Ask Someone Before You Have Sex With Them
NPR reports that there’s some scientific evidence such a thing does indeed happen. “With low-level, low-severity storm advisories, we actually found an uptick in births nine months later,” Richard Evans, a professor of economics at Brigham Young University, told NPR, citing his 2008 study with Yingyao Hu and Zhong Zhao. “So, it was about a 2 percent increase with tropical storm watches.”
Of course, the key phrase there is “low-level, low-severity storm,” which applies to this week’s storms. So it’s safe to assume that Wednesday night, a not insignificant number of people were having sex they wouldn’t have had in better weather, which means in October thousands of snow babies will be born?
-
Related Story: 5 Ways to Improve Your Sex Life in Under Five Minutes Flat
But what about more serious storms? Those, as you might, expect don’t leave people feeling so sexy. “The other thing we found — that is also intuitive, but no one had ever detected this before — was that, with the most severe storm warnings … you get almost an equal decrease in births nine months later,” Evans said. “And the story there is if you’re running for your life, you can’t make babies.”
