A LITTLE BACKGROUND MUSIC. Lead vocalist in a trio of Cleveland rock bands in her teens, Anne Cochran was putting down demos and jingles before making everything official with a degree in Theater and Voice from Case Western Reserve University.
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) Our current world population is approximately 7.2 billion and growing. It passed the 7 billion mark in 2011.
When Atwood was writing The Handmaid's Tale in the early 1980s, about 3.6 million babies were born in the U.S. per year. Thirty years later, birth rates are again hovering in that range, after a boom in the early 2000s, with birth rates for women under 30 steadily declining.