Questions about births
Each answer is generated from the same dataset the map draws, so the numbers here and the numbers on the map are the same numbers.
- How many babies are born each year? About 132.1 million worldwide, fewer than at the peak in 2012.
- How many babies are born every day? Around 361,700 a day, and 15,070 an hour.
- How many babies are born every second? About 4.2 every second, roughly four heartbeats apart.
- Which country has the most babies? India, by a wide margin, and it has not always been India.
- Where in the world are most babies born? Asia still leads, but Africa is closing fast.
- How many people have ever been born? This map covers 45 billion of them. The full answer is much larger, and much less certain.
- Where were most babies born 1,000 years ago? Two thirds of the world’s babies were born in Asia in the year 1000.
- How have births changed through history? Flat for eighteen centuries, then a fourteen-fold rise, then a turn downward.