[The moon and delivery]

In different cultures and mythologies, the moon is related with fertility, pregnancy and delivery. Professional obstetricians also notice an increase in care demands on the days when the moon is full. Many studies have been made which try to correlate delivery processes to the phases of the moon with contradictory results. The authors plan to try to find any basis in fact which support these popular beliefs and to discover if lunar phases bear an influence on the distribution of deliveries. They carried out a descriptive transversal study on a total of 1715 unassisted deliveries over the course of ten complete lunar cycles. The authors have carried out a descriptive and inferential analysis, a one way ANOVA and a Kruskal Wallis test on their three data bases which are general, primipara and multipara in which they contemplated the total number of deliveries per phase, the mean of each phase, as well as the central day in each phase of the lunar cycle. The differences found in the distribution of deliveries over the four lunar phases, along with the comparison of the means and the comparison of the number of deliveries on the central day in each phase are not statistically significant. The different phases in the lunar cycle and especially the full moon do not appear to have any influence over the distribution of deliveries in this study.