Post 9/11, male foetal deaths rose alarmingly high

9/11 is long gone, but it still haunts the American psyche. A new study has revealed that the stress felt by pregnant women soon after the terror strikes on September 11, 2001 led to an increase in miscarriages of male fetuses in the US.

It has been found that male foetal death rate zoomed in September 2001, thereby strongly diminishing the ratio of boys born in a later month.

A CNN report, quoting the study published in the journal BMC Public Health, says that such an alarming situation has been recorded even in women who did not have any of their kin killed or injured in the 9/11 attacks. Terming such a situation as communal bereavement, researchers have said that the media coverage of the terror attacks were so huge that a majority of the population had witnessed the deaths and damage onscreen.

As it has been a know fact that pregnancy is sensitive to stress, the study comes to a conclusion that pregnant women could have had a physiological reaction to witnessing such blatant carnage. The death of male fetuses has been explained as male foetuses tend to be more sensitive than females to stress hormones. This has been proven earlier too as it had been found that the percentage of male births decline shortly after natural disasters, economic decline or catastrophes strike.

For instance, it has been revealed in a study conducted in 1998 that there was a decline in male births in Japan after the Kobe earthquake in January 1995. Though researchers are left wondering as to why this happens, the new finding also point to the fact that male babies born prematurely tend to encounter more health problems than females.

As pr the study, the average foetal deaths happened in the month of September after 2001. While the average monthly number of male foetal deaths used to be 995, for September 2001, the number grew to 1,115.