No one liked the government shutdown, but apparently, it wasn’t without love. The kind of love that transpires when, say, you and your partner both don’t have to go to work. One week passes. Then two. You’re bored. You’re adults. You share a bed. 
 
 And nine months later, there you are at a hospital that seems strangely overcrowded. 
 
 “We keep getting asked, ‘What’s going on?’ ” said Sibley Memorial Hospital nurse Yulette Newman. “And we sit back and say, ‘Well, you’re in D.C. What was happening nine months ago?’ ” 
 
 According to some local hospitals, one apparent aftereffect of the 16-day October furlough has made its way into maternity wards. At Sibley, for example, an average of 9.2 births occur daily. During the past month, that number has increased by three births, or 32.6 percent, per day. 
 
 Newman, who has been a nurse in Sibley’s Family Centered Care Unit for eight years, is credited by her fellow nurses with predicting the so-called baby boom. On the 10th day of the shutdown, she posted a photo of an “Expected Date of Confinement Wheel” on Facebook. The circular calendar is used by obstetricians to predict when a baby will be born, based on the date of conception. 
 
 Furlough babies? (Getty) 
 
 The caption “Furlough babies????” earned Newman 16 likes, 22 comments and a little boost in hospital fame come June, when the number of births was on the rise. 
 
 Nurses at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, Md., were making the same jokes this month, when births in the first half of July increased from 265 in 2013 to 385 in 2014. 
 
 There were 99 additional births at Virginia Hospital Center in the months of April, May and June, although spokeswoman Maryanne Boster acknowledged that birth rates have been rising at the hospital for a few years. 
 
 The fruitful aftermath of shutdown boredom could also be seen in federal offices. Jessica Hernandez, a program analyst for the Food and Drug Administration, was one of three pregnant women in her 150-person office after the shutdown. She traced the conception of her daughter Gabrielle Nadine, who was born June 3, to her time off work, although she admits it was “all kind of hazy.” 
 
 “It was definitely stressful not knowing when we would get paid, but I actually had a great time,” Hernandez said. “I got lunch with other feds, hung out with my mom, volunteered at my other daughter’s school, cleaned some closets and then just relaxed.” 
 
 Her relaxation contributed to her better mood, she recalled, and her better mood contributed to her choice of activities when her husband came home from his sales consulting job. 
 
 Carl Woog, a Pentagon employee whose wife recently gave birth to a baby boy, said they tracked her conception date back to just after the shutdown ended. Although Woog wasn’t furloughed, he and his wife “may have been celebrating congressional action,” he joked. 
 
 Of course, with this raft of happy new arrivals come the baby-boom skeptics — those who say that any uptick in Beltway babies is purely coincidental. And there isn’t an increase everywhere. Nationwide, birth rates are still near historic lows. Communications departments at Medstar Washington Hospital Center, Medstar Georgetown University Hospital and Inova Fairfax Hospital balked at the post-shutdown baby-boom claim, saying they have seen no significant rise in births. 
 
 Statisticians have also weighed in, noting that claims of baby booms have previously popped up in the news media after severe weather or events. A well-known 1970 study discredited a baby boom reported in the New York Times after the Great Blackout of 1965. 
 
 But more recent work has shown tangible increases in fertility after the Oklahoma City bombing and after a string of hurricane advisories on the East Coast. 
 
 Newman, the nurse at Sibley Hospital, says there will always be skeptics of the theories that she and many other maternity nurses believe in: that full moons, drops in barometric pressure and bad weather all can affect conception and birth rates. 
 
 “But every time [something unusual happens], I think, nine months from now, here we go!” Newman said. “And sure enough, I’m usually right.” 
 
 
 
 CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the sex of one of the children mentioned. Carl Woog’s wife gave birth to a boy ||||| — For years, the weather has been a scapegoat for allegedly causing cabin-fever induced spikes in births, and now some in the Washington area are pointing to Congress to explain packed maternity wards at several local hospitals. 
 
 This July, nine months after Congress failed to pass appropriations legislation _ shutting down much of the government and sending hundreds of thousands of federal workers home for more than two weeks _ some hospitals are reporting higher-than-average numbers of births. Skeptics say the coincidence is probably just another false “baby boom” claim, which have been made after hurricanes, snowstorms and even the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. 
 
 “Usually these stories are just romantic hypotheses with nothing to support them,” said Philip Morgan, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who’s the director of the Carolina Population Center. “A few hospitals will have extra babies, so if you go looking for evidence you can find it.” 
 
 In 1970, statistician Richard Udry published an analysis of a supposed baby boom reported by The New York Times nine months after a blackout had hit the city in the fall of 1965. Examining the combined hospital statistics throughout the city compared with averages from several years prior, Udry found no evidence of a real rise in births. 
 
 Still, even Udry knew that his evidence would hardly quell the excitement related to reports of such baby booms. 
 
 “It is evidently pleasing to many people to fantasy that when people are trapped by some immobile event which deprives them of their usual activities, most will turn to copulation,” Udry wrote. 
 
 UNC’s Morgan said such events were unlikely to affect the birthrate because they rarely had an effect on other factors, such as couples using contraception. However, he said some cases had been scientifically corroborated, including a rise in births in metropolitan Oklahoma City after the bombings in 1995 and a decrease following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in Southern states. 
 
 “It’s possible, but I doubt it,” Morgan said. “If anything, the government shutdown would irritate people and make them rethink having a child.” 
 
 While it would take years to compare this year’s births with the long-term trend to prove such a boom, the spike in births at at least one hospital has people excited. 
 
 “It’s not actually a rumor, it’s real,” said Gary Stephenson, a spokesman for Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, who said the hospital had averaged three more births per day so far in July compared with the same period last year. In addition, the hospital had eight more babies this June than it did in June 2013. 
 
 While Stephenson acknowledged that the increased rate wasn’t beyond the norm, he said similar past events, such as the debunked post-blackout boom in New York, seemed to give such anomalies credit. 
 
 “When you see constituent bumps (in births) over time . . . I think it does cause one to think,” Stephenson said, adding that a nurse at Sibley had predicted the recent uptick. 
 
 Not all hospitals said they had evidence of a baby boom, however. A spokeswoman for MedStar Washington Hospital Center, the district’s largest, said the maternity ward there hadn’t seen any recent anomalies in the number of births, which was actually down in recent weeks. 
 
 Brian Williams, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” took the opportunity of the reported boom to offer some on-air humor. 
 
 “How long until someone on television points out that during the shutdown the folks in Washington are apparently doing at home what Washington has been accused of doing to the American people?” Williams said last week. 
 
 A similar case of an alleged baby boom made news last year, when some hospitals in New Jersey reported a surge in births nine months after Hurricane Sandy hit the region in October 2012. 
 
 The phenomenon was also recently referenced in a Hyundai commercial that aired during the FIFA World Cup competition. The ad showed a packed maternity ward before flashing back nine months to victory celebrations in which a young couple lock eyes and begin kissing. 
 
 The federal government shutdown, which occurred last Oct. 1 to Oct. 16, sent roughly 800,000 federal workers home during that period. In addition, more than 1 million employees were required to work without pay. Congress later restored pay for all the federal workers. 
 
 Email: jmoritz@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @JCMoritzTU.
– As the nation's capital languished during October's 16-day government shutdown, a nurse in Washington, DC, made a Facebook prediction: “Furlough babies????" Lo and behold nine months later, reps at Sibley Memorial Hospital, where the nurse works, say there’s been a nearly 33% increase in births over the last month, says the Washington Post, while two other area hospitals report similarly notable jumps. Anecdotal evidence seems to support the timeline, with one FDA analyst recalling the time around her new daughter’s conception as "all kind of hazy," while a Pentagon worker cops to "celebrating congressional action" with his wife. Similar booms have been positively correlated with other major events—including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and a series of East Coast hurricane warnings, notes the Post. But not everyone’s convinced: At least three other DC-area hospitals tell the Post they haven’t seen any "significant" increase, and a sociologist who spoke with McClatchy DC says that seemingly burgeoning birth rates after such events are "usually … just romantic hypotheses with nothing to support them." (Read about a massive Native American baby boom that reportedly took place 1,500 years ago.)