Pregnant through prayer

Prayer can work wonders, as American and Korean doctors have now discovered in an astonishing study: fervent prayers apparently helped unintentionally childless women to become pregnant - but it was not the women who asked God for help but complete strangers.

199 women underwent artificial fertilization. Half of them belonged to the test group. Strangers received pictures of these women and repeatedly prayed that they finally became pregnant.

The result: "Almost fifty percent of the women in the group got pregnant as opposed to only 26 percent in the control group, for whom no one prayed", explains study director Dr. Rogerio Lobo, the head gynecologist at Columbia University (USA). Doctors have no explanation for this phenomenon. "We only made the study out of curiosity - no one had ever studied anything like this before", says Dr. Lobo. As the women did not know which group they belonged to, the women in the prayer group cannot possibly feel better and therefore be more probable to get pregnant. Because the repeatedly supervised investigation also met the highest statistical requirements, manipulation can be ruled out. (bs)

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