re: ‘Muhammad’ Breaks Into Top 10 U.S. Baby Names for First Time Ever

quote:

---

How can a name, that is mainly used exclusively by Muslims, which is 1.1% of the population, crack the top ten?

Someone crunch some numbers here, because on the surface that doesn't make much sense to me.

---

U.S. population: 320 million.

1.1% of 320 million = 3.52 million.

The pregnancy rate for women is 102.1 per 1000. For the sake of this exercise lets double that for Muslims to 205 per 1000. Lets also assume that half of the 3.52 million Muslims are women. So that means out of 1.76 million people 360,800 were pregnant. Lets also assume that half of those pregnancies were boys at 180,400.

So there are approximately 180,400 Muslims boys born per year.

Now lets do the exercise for the remaining population of 316.48 million people.

Let now assume that the pregnancy rate of the remaining population is lower at 90 pregnancies per 1000. So conservatively that would mean there are 14.25 million non-Muslim pregnancies per year. Half of those are boys at 7.12 million.

Total boys born = 180,400 + 7,120,000 = 7.3 million boys.

If all the Muslim boys born were named Muhammad and all the remaining boys born were not named Muhammad the percentage of boys named Muhammad would = 100 X 180,400/7.3 million = 2.5%.



I got the birth rates from the CDC.