That’s the interesting title of an article from The Quarterly Journal of Economics which is cited by the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society and linked on townhall.com today. The authors compared data from the Centers for Disease Control and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and made a thought provoking discovery:
Among its many findings, the study documents that babies who are conceived during times of high unemployment ? when women?s earnings and labor-force participation rates decrease ? begin their lives with significantly better physical health outcomes than children conceived when unemployment is lower … economists Rajeev Dehejia and Adiana Lleras-Muney found that such babies have a reduced incidence of low and very low birth weight, reduced mortality rates (both neonatal and postneonatal), and fewer congenital malformations.
One sobering observation from the article is that when times are good, people who ought to know better skimp on prenatal care. I suppose that falls in the category of “too busy”.
