This may be the most unnecessary statement ever made, but I’ve never been pregnant.

Shocking, I know. But I’ve never felt a baby kick my liver from the inside, constant nausea for no reason and a seismic hormonal shift.

Since I’ve never felt such temporary sensations before, I’ve never been desperate to get rid of them.

My wife, however, has been down that road twice.

During her second pregnancy with our son Rigby, she was willing to try just about anything to induce labor.

Luckily for her, she caught wind of the Amici Ristorante eggplant Parmesan phenomenon.

The Kenmore restaurant has made a name itself as a labor aid. The 14-year-old eatery boasts a 20-of-21 success rate in its eggplant Parmesan inducing labor within 24 hours of consumption, owner Orazio Gervasi said.

“It started when some pregnant woman came in craving eggplant, and she was overdue,” said Gervasi, who gave some of the credit to his wife Domenica for helping implant the idea. “She called the next day and told us she had the baby.

“She told someone, and then they told someone, and then they told someone. It became a funny thing, and we kept talking about it.”

My wife is among the success stories, as she did in fact deliver Rigby the day after finishing her eggplant (she ate half the first day and felt nothing, then finished the dish the next day and went into labor early in the morning of the third day). But is it scientifically possible for eggplant to trigger birth?

Gervasi, for his part, has heard from doctors who take both sides of the issue.

“I’m not sure. All I know is it’s one of our specials,” he said. “We sell a ton of it — trays, by the case. We sell a lot.”A majority of the medical and scientific evidence that’s available suggests that this is little more than myth.

The urban legend-debunking Web site snopes.com declared the claim false, while maternity

corner.com said the oregano and basil in eggplant (but not the fruit itself) have properties that may cause contractions, although it’s not known how or in what quantity (it should be stated for the record that Gervasi does not use oregano in his eggplant Parmesan).

Any link to eggplant and birth, according to justmommies.com, is little more than a coincidence due to timing.

Just like other legends that have spicy foods triggering labor, the phenomenon is due more to the fact that the woman is full term and is actually supposed to deliver than anything that’s eaten.

“No method is guaranteed to work,” a report on the site read. “If your baby and body (are) not ready, labor will not begin.”

Indeed, the body of the wife of photographer Doug Benz was not ready last weekend. The couple went to Amici and sampled the eggplant, but the Friday night meal had failed to deliver any results as of Monday (they've since given birth to a son, their fourth child).

So as the success rate drops to 20-of-22, the physical link between body and meal remains unresolved.

There may be a mental link, however. The snopes.com report cites a woman’s mental state as playing a role in the phenomenon, as a woman’s belief that eggplant Parmesan will trigger labor may contribute to the birth taking place — sort of like a very delicious prayer.

“If a woman believes the meal she just ate will send her into labor, in a handful of cases that conviction might have a hastening effect. But even then, the result has nothing to do with the physical properties of the item the woman ate, but of her faith in it,” the snopes.com article said.

“If you were to chart the results of a group of such women, you'd find that a great many of them would give birth to their children within a day or so no matter what they ate or did, with almost all of the rest delivering no more than two or three days after that.

“Special menu items appear to do the trick for the same reason various folklore ‘wart cures’ seem to work: By the time the one so afflicted is sufficiently fed up with her situation so as to seek remedy to it, the problem bedeviling her is in the process of resolving itself.”

The topic is among the items up for discussion at the annual meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, taking place through Tuesday in Chicago. One of the lectures taking place Monday is “Use of Nonprescribed Methods to Induce Labor,” which will address the food issue, among others.

Dr. Edward Kelly Bartels, an obstetrician with a practice in the Town of Tonawanda, said he’s seen no medical evidence to back the eggplant claim, but the issue remains open for debate within the medical community.

“There doesn’t seem to be much to support this idea,” he said.

Don’t tell that to Gervasi’s customers, though. He can’t count the number of pregnant ladies who have entered Amici seeking relief (the 20-of-22 statistic is compiled only from those women who have called back), with the most recent success story coming a couple months ago.

“We know there’s a lot of women that come in. They’re going to be induced, and they don’t want to be,” he said. “It’s a pretty neat thing.”

Contact editor Paul Lane

at 693-1000, ext. 116,

or paul.lane@tonawanda-news.com.朠