It was nine months ago this week that the Federal Government experienced a partial shutdown. The budget impasse between House Republicans and the Obama administration over funding for Obamacare kept several thousand federal employees home for two weeks.
The bulk of those workers live in the D.C./Maryland/Virginia area and now, nine months later, we have tangible proof of what many of those federal employees were doing with the extra time on their hands.
According to CBS radio, the D.C. area is experiencing a mini-baby boom:
WNEW’s Kimberly Suiters reports that Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington has seen an additional 100 babies born in the last three months compared to that time period in 2013.
Sibley Hospital in Northwest D.C. has seen three more babies than normal per day this month.
It was there that Suiters spoke with a couple who had an induction scheduled for Monday but were told about an hour before they were originally supposed to arrive that there was no room in the maternity ward.
Ali Heidarpour, a Labor Department employee, says he and his wife, Sarah, didn’t even realize that the shutdown might cause an uptick in births. Nor did they put it together until this week that they conceived their baby girl, who was born Tuesday afternoon, while Ali was sequestered.
So after all the hand-wringing and predictions of Armageddon the nation had to endure as sob story after sob story occupied the cable news networks showing the plight of IRS and EPA bureaucrats who were forced into a two-week paid vacation, it's pretty obvious now that these guys weren't quite as stressed out as we were led to believe.