Babies born minutes too soon cost their parents up to €25,000, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin
There's no visible difference between the two newborn babies with their Mister Magoo eyes, Ernest Borgnine noses and Donald Trump comb-overs.
The only difference is that little Dominic Constantin was born in Berlin at 10.20pm on New Year's Eve and Inka Angelina was born at 1.03am on New Year's Day. Dominic may be just a week old but he has already cost his parents up to €25,000.
If he had held out until after midnight, his parents would have qualified for Germany's new parents' allowance that replaced the existing children's allowance on January 1st and entitles a stay-at-home parent of a new baby to 67 per cent of their regular income, up to €1,800 monthly, for the first 14 months of their parenthood.
While Dominic's parents have to make do with the old allowance, totalling €3,600, Inka Angelina's parents can look forward to €11,256 over the next year or €1,200 a month.
"Of course it's annoying but I was really only concerned that the baby was healthy," said Yvonne Schult of her 3.7kg son. The father, Christoph Lenz, says: "We didn't give the money any thought."
In the last weeks of the year, newspapers were filled with reports of expectant mothers anxiously studying calendars and doing calculations in the hope that they would give birth in 2007 and not 2006.
One German television station sent a couple with a hidden camera to a series of doctors asking for help to delay the birth of their child.
One doctor, apparently, agreed.
On New Year's Eve, the corridors of maternity hospitals, normally filled with pacing fathers-to-be, were swarming with clock-watching journalists.
In the end, though, nature took its course and the stork's delivery schedule went unaltered.
"The excitement of politicians and the media before New Year's Day was far greater than that of the parents," said Dr Volker Thäle, consultant at the University Clinic in Halle.
"According to the newspaper reports, parents were queuing up at their doctor's for tips to delay the birth. That was not our experience - here in Halle we had precisely zero inquiries to that effect," he said.
The parents' allowance was introduced by German family minister Ursula von der Leyen, a trained scientist, doctor and mother of seven children.
She hopes the allowance - expected to cost €3.8 billion annually - will prevent parents falling into a financial black hole in the first year, one of the main reasons many young couples put off having their first child.
"Above all, the parents' allowance makes clear that the personal responsibility of having a child doesn't automatically mean giving up financial independence," she explained. "Time is money and, vice versa, money creates time, time for children and their parents." The family ministry says it expects about 660,000 applications during the year and to encourage a turnaround in Germany's falling birth rate - one of the lowest in the EU and now at its lowest level since 1945.
But only time will tell whether it will make family and career complementary for German women. Some 60 per cent of women never return to the workplace after giving birth. Those who do - just one in five, three years after giving birth - are often labelled a Rabenmutter, an uncaring "raven mother" who leaves her child in daycare. It's a strange irony in the land that gave the world the kindergarten.
Julia Gotschlich, mother of new-year baby Inka Angelina, says the new allowance will allow her to stay much longer at home.
"Without the allowance we would have €900 less a month," she says.
"We all hoped the birth would happen in this year and it did, thank God!"