Students learn in microeconomics that the demand curve for a good, which shows the relationship between the price of a good and the quantity of the good that consumers demand-i.e. are willing, ready, and able to purchase-has a negative slope.
The UNICEF estimates that an average of 353,000 babies are born each day around the world. The crude birth rate is 18.9 births per 1,000 population or 255 births globally per minute or 4.3 births every second (as of Dec. 2013 estimate).
About 15 million babies are preterm each year (5% to 18% of all deliveries). In many countries rates of premature births have increased between the 1990s and 2010s. Complications from preterm births resulted in 0.74 million deaths in 2013 down from 1.57 million in 1990.