HAPPINESS SPARKED HORMONE RUSH: Germany's World Cup Baby Boom

Last summer's mix of sun, beer and excitement during the football World Cup appears to have produced a massive hormone rush in German bedrooms, gardens and back alleys. Nine months on, birth clinics across the country that hosted the tournament are reporting a much-needed baby boom.

The football World Cup from June 9 to July 9 last year appears to have sparked a baby boom in the host country Germany, where hospitals are reporting a marked rise in imminent births nine months after the tournament, remembered here as a month-long fairy-tale of sunshine, parties and soccer success.

The head of the largest birth clinic in the city of Kassel, Rolf Kliche, estimates that births at his hospital will be up by 10 to 15 percent, which he described as a "minor sensation" given the usually stable birth statistics.

Kliche said he wasn't surprised because happiness tends to release hormones and makes it easier to get pregnant. "With many people the excitement they felt during the matches seems to have lasted and been employed in other ways after the final whistle," he told Hessicher Rundfunk radio.

Other hospitals around Germany are reporting increased bookings for ante-natal classes although many are predicting the increase will be smaller than 15 percent.

Pia Schmidt from Verna had been trying to get pregnant for two years and reckons that Germany's 1-0 victory over Poland, a nail-biting encounter decided in injury time, cracked it. "I can remember it exactly," Pia, 27, told Hessischer Rundfunk. "We had a barbecue, had invited friends and everyone was in a good mood." Her husband Sascha said: "And when Germany won, my wife and I went on celebrating after the game."

Yeah. It obviously needs soccer and a barrel of beer in Germany to get some kids.

Beside of such usually the best reason for men to become father are still sexy girls that promise to be good mothers. Since I have a nice family and 3 kids of my own I know what I am speaking about. Since the contemporary German "family policy" is favouring somehow a feminized man that finds his fate in replacing pampers, I doubt that it is suitable to break the German "strike of the potential fathers". Even much more than German women overthink young men if being father fits into their personal way of living.

The changed society that demands further and further involvement of men into typical female duties is not nessicarily attractive to young men. Maybe to gays or diaper-fetishists, but not to healthy and self-confident men. Since every second marriage in Germany is divorced and the role of many fathers is reduced to payment, young men have reason to be careful. Founding a familiy is dangerous for males in Germany. The disconnection of sex and unavoidable reproduction through contraception opens the possibility to live with (a) nice girlfriend(s) without being lost in the pro-female German forrest of paragraphs. I have many of such guys in my circle of friends. In difference to women most men do not see children as something that they need bodily and can afford to act much cooler in that question. It is nothing unusual to stay single in contemporary Germany.

The biggest problem for academic women i.e. is not the absence of day-care centers but the absence of men who want to marry a "difficult" woman that is used to push through her own concepts. I.e. it took me (a academic German male) many years and quite a few girlfriends until I found what I was looking for: A woman with traditional family values that is not stupid. I.e. some of my former (BTW all very nice and cute but "difficult") girlfriends wanted to "slide in a baby" between two jobs to give it away into childcare then. I was always aware that such simply can not work and sooner or later I refused to be the father of such a poor baby. At least they were not crazy enough to ask me to take the "Elternzeit" (parental leave). Buhuhaha! :-)))

I might sound like a dumb macho, but my traditional family (my wife stayed at home until our youngest son was 6 years old before she started working in a part-time job again) works perfectly. I am living in a stable and defined relationship and my own interests are kept.

Our socialist German familiy minister von der Leyen (CDU) obviously does not understand that more children are also a question of willing fathers.

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