Canadians most likely to be born on Sept. 20, Statistics Canada reports

A graphic produced by Statistics Canada ranks which days are more or less common for births. Photo by handout

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If you had a birthday last month, happy belated. Also, you’re not that special.

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Statistics Canada has just released information on the number of live births in Canada, broken down by month and, even further, by date. Upon crunching the numbers, they determined that Sept. 20 was the most likely date on which to be born between 1995 and 2025.

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That might seem random, but it’s part of a larger trend. The second most common birthday is just two days earlier, on Sept. 18. Third is Sept. 25.

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You have to dig down to the ninth most common birthday to find one that falls in another month — July 5 to be exact. In all, 16 of the 20 most common days on which to be born are in September. July and August were also home to larger-than-average numbers of birthdays.

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One of the first comments in response to the agency’s tweet about the topic was: “Technically all those September babies are Christmas babies.” That’s true. The average human gestation from conception to birth is about 267 days. Subtract that from Sept. 20 and you get Dec. 28, right in the middle of the Christmas holidays.

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Some of the (many) people born on Sept. 20 include hockey star Guy Lafleur, author George R.R. Martin and Italian actress Sophia Loren.

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The least common birthday, not surprisingly, was Feb. 29, since that date only occurs once every four years. Next least common was a cluster of three days — Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Far more babies were born in summer months that winter ones.

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One of the more surprising revelations was that Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 were unlikely days on which to be born, falling 359th and 362nd, respectively. Some famous New Year’s babies include Australian actress Angourie Rice, authors E.M. Forster and J.D. Salinger, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

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News organizations, starved for stories over the holidays and anxious for joyous coverage, like to report on the first baby of the New Year.

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It can even be lucrative. Reader’s Digest reports that, in 2022, Dignity Health St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Las Vegas gave its first baby of the year a large gift basket filled with diapers and baby supplies. The following year, Kaleida Health’s Oishei Children’s Hospital in Buffalo, N.Y., presented New Year’s twins with a basket of baby essentials and a $1,000 savings bond.

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And last year Prudential Financial rolled out a $150 “Generation Beta Baby Bonus” for any baby born in the U.S. on Jan. 1, the official start of the next generation. It was a nice bit of PR and a nudge for new parents to start saving early for things like education and their own retirement.

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Perhaps people aren’t doing the math required to have a baby born at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Or maybe they’re too busy worrying about taxes in early April to get busy with other things.

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