On Monday, the Worldometers clock, which rapidly ticks off the ever-increasing number of humans inhabiting our planet, leapt across the seven-billion mark. In honor of the staggering sum (and with a hat tip to Harper’s), let’s look at some other numbers relating to population.
• Cost of raising a child, birth to age eighteen, excluding college, for a middle-income, two-parent family in the United States as of 2010: $226,920
• Percentage increase of cost to raise a child since 2000: 40
• Nationwide rank of Texas, whose primary approach to sexual education is abstinence-only, in teen pregnancy rates: 5
• Annual cost of teen pregancies to Texan taxpayers: $1.2 billion
• Ranking of frank open discussion about sex between men and women as the most effective form of birth control, according to researchers: 1
• Percentage of married or coupled women of reproductive age in the least developed
nations who want to delay their next pregnancy but are not using birth control: 23
• Percentage of married or coupled women of reproductive age in developing nations who want to delay their next pregnancy but are not using birth control: 9
• Year that contraceptive use was made legal in the United States: 1965
• The average number of births to each death this year: 2.3
• Percentage of Medicare spending that goes to the 5 percent of people who are in their last year of life: 25
• Year the first IVF (in-vitro fertilization) baby was born: 1978
• Percentage chance that a U.S. child born today is a result of IVF: 1
• Number of children born every second: 2
• Minimum worth of the U.S. infertility services market in 2008: $4,000,000,000
• Cost of one round of IVF treatment: $12,000
• Cost of artificial insemination treatment using sperm donor found on the Internet: 0
• Sentence Trent Arsenault (trentdonor.org) faces if he does not obey the order from the FDA to cease-and-desist from freely distributing his sperm to Bay Area lesbians:$100,000 fine, one year in prison
• Number of children “donorsexual” Trent Arsenault claims to have sired: 15
• Amount a college male can make annually by selling sperm twice weekly: $12,000
• Minimum number of children a married couple needs to be raising in order to be eligible for Russia’s Order of Parental Glory, formed in 2009 to reverse the country’s negative population growth: 4
• Amount of Russian government money the couple receives as part of Order of Parental Glory decoration: $1700
