It’s Official--Stork Is Roosting on Base : Births: Predictions of a post-Desert Storm baby boom at Camp Pendleton are proving true.

Just for the record, the post-Operation Desert Storm baby boom at Camp Pendleton that military and hospital officials were cautiously predicting a few months ago has come true.

Unlike before, when officials based their baby-boom speculation on gut feeling and an unusual rise in positive pregnancy tests, now there’s irrefutable physical evidence. Babies.

The Naval Hospital on base and community hospitals are reporting a sharp jump in the number of babies born to Marine families, a trend that began in late December and seems to be continuing, although nobody can say for how long.

“We certainly are seeing a major increase in the last six weeks that we can confirm,” said Denise Stearns, spokeswoman for the Fallbrook Hospital District, where the normal 25 military births a month leaped to 46 in January.

“There’s your boom,” Stearns said, adding that February seems just as busy, “so we’re off and running.”

Nobody is exactly shocked that more than 20,000 Marines and Navy corpsmen from Camp Pendleton who were deployed to the Persian Gulf--many of them gone for nine months--would return home last spring with certain activities in mind. It’s all happened before.

“The baby boom we saw after World War II was unique in that it lasted 20 years,” said Karen Ladley, assistant administrator at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside.

But with the Gulf War being “short-lived,” Ladley suspects this new excursion into Babyland will be briefer and more “within normal parameters.”

Even so, the khaki stork has been visiting Tri-City more frequently these days, and the average of 380 monthly births before the war rose to 418 in December and 430 last month.

“We are averaging 50 extra births a month, the majority of which are military,” Ladley said. “That’s a fairly significant increase.”

Tri-City, which anticipated the birth trend and set aside additional beds, is expecting the increase in deliveries to continue, based on the word of physicians who are still seeing many more patients for prenatal counseling.

“We’re projecting that certainly it will go through May and possibly June,” Ladley said.

Because of staffing limitations, the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton can deliver only about 100 babies a month, and sends the surplus cases to local community hospitals under the Civilian Health and Medical Program for the Uniformed Services, or CHAMPUS, which provides off-base medical service for military dependents.

However, the base hospital has ample evidence of the baby boom through higher numbers of positive pregnancy tests handled by the hospital laboratory.

Normally, the base hospital gets three or four positives a day; the figure reached eight in July, six in August, eight in September, six in October and five in November.

“This is the best data I’ve seen to demonstrate that something is going on,” said Navy Capt. William Rowley, commanding officer at the Naval Hospital.

“The number of positive pregnancy tests went up to almost three times what it was at baseline, but now it’s coming down again,” Rowley said.

He believes the baby boom is quickly leveling off and that the number of postwar babies might turn out to be fairly modest.

If anything, he speculated, many couples may have decided “it’s no time to start a family,” because of the high cost of living and military manpower reductions that have put career plans in doubt.

“It’s rough to be a serviceman in California, it’s so cotton-picking expensive,” Rowley said.

Besides Camp Pendleton’s Marines, thousands of sailors from San Diego were deployed to the Persian Gulf, but the Navy doesn’t seem to have contributed significantly to the infant population.

“There has been no baby boom, not here,” said Howard Samuelson, a spokesman for the Naval Hospital in Balboa Park.

Military officials explained that sailors weren’t deployed as a massive force and didn’t return home all at once like the Marines did in March and April.