Oh, babies!
As troops return home from the Iraq surge, the stork trails just behind By Rebekah Sanderlin
the mall, and every restaurant is littered with high chairs turned upside down to accommodate all the baby carriers. Fayetteville, always a fertile community, seems to be chock full of expecting women and newborns. “People leave, they come home,
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they decide to start a family, they get pregnant,” explained Shannon Lynch, spokeswoman for Womack Army Medical Center on Fort Bragg, where many military couples deliver their babies. The entire 82nd Airborne Division
was deployed in 2007 for the first time since the Gulf War. Soldiers from the 82nd began returning home that October. Add to that the other 29,000 soldiers who work on Fort Bragg, many of whom were also returning home from deployments, and it makes sense that by last August, Womack was seeing a 50 percent increase in births from the
Right | Kim and Anthony Martinez recently
welcomed Brandon at Womack Army Medical Center on Fort Bragg. The hospital has experienced a surge of new births
with a record number of 300 deliveries in
August. But the boom continues – Womack is on track to deliver 294 babies in May.
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erhaps you’ve bumped into them or maybe you’ve just seen them – pregnant bellies and baby strollers are everywhere. They clog walkways
in
