EVERY 24 hours
- 100 million sexual intercourses
- 1 million pregnancies
- half are unplanned
- half of those are unwanted
- so 250,000 unwanted pregnancies means 150,000 abortions per day (including 50,000 illegal)

-seems to me the real figures are about half of this as there are only 350,000 births per day, but people agree on the ratios

So - Accounting for natural failure rate (miscarriage, stillbirth), abortions and 20% of UU births being replaced by planned I estimate the actual number of reduced births to be 10% (I didn't factor in multiple births but I guess it's quite small)

- We have 10% more children then we actually want
10% That would be a damm good saving.

- Climate Change - All the time I hear about things intended to help reduce CO2 emissions, most of the time the mathematics is very weak indeed half the time I find that overall they'll cause a net increase in CO2 emissions when you include CO2 from manufacture. Then I find out we have 10% more children than we want. ... How ridiculous humanity is !

- Can you extrapolate those extra 10% biths to 10% extra CO2 ? Yes I think so.

- 1. an extra child in Africa is far less CO2 heavy than an American.

- 2. Surely the majority of those Unplanned children are born outside Heavy CO2 use countries. ... No the proportions seemed to be pretty universal 78% of Indian births are unplanned, but they are more likely to be wanted.

- Look out of you window count 10 cars and imagine the 10th one not existing how much CO2 would that save ? Imagine that it had never existed that no CO2 had been generated in it's production, that no forests had been cleared to get the raw materials for it's production. Do the same for 10 houses imagine if that 10th house had never existed the energy and resources saved in never firing the bricks that were not needed to make it. Now look at 10 people in the room and imagine if one of them had never existed so had never needed a car a house and will not go on to produce generations of future children that need the Earth's resources. Not only would the worlds Carbon Footprint be reduced by more than 10%, but the whole ecological footprint would be reduced by more than 10%.
- Yet that 10th person shouldn't be there, he shouldn't have been born.

- No sacrifices, No lifestyle changes, we could have the same number of children we want instead of making the mess we do out of family planning

- Half of pregnancies are unplanned and half of them unwanted. I couldn't believe this when I heard it, but it does seem to be scientifically accepted.
- This 25% unplanned and unwanted pregnancies becomes 10% live births ..after accounting for natural failure rate (miscarriage, stillbirth), abortions and 20% of UU births being replaced by a planned birth I calculate.

- Yes, People are coming up with all kind of gimmicks to reduce CO2 yet the fact is we have 10% more children that we actually want.

- Of course we can't cut this 10% accidental overpopulation over night, but the investment needed to stop perpetuating it will surely one of the most cost effective CO2 reducing measures. Indeed if we don't fix this other sacrifices seem futile.

................

- Notes :
from the BBC Forum 29/03/2009 I heard CARL DJERASSI quote that WHO say that half pregnancies are unplanned and half of those are unwanted. http://www.djerassi.com/icsi2/index.html I checked and this is generally accepted as true.

- Confirmation - "In global terms the situation is this: Every minute of every day, 380 women become pregnant; 190 women face unplanned or unwanted pregnancies." (http://www.safemotherhood.org/).

- Why 10% ?
- Wow I thought you could say that abut 25% of us shouldn't be here and what a positive ecological effect that woud have cos human consumption of everything including CO2 would be 25% lower. But hang on a moment we are live adults and how do we translate pregnancies to live births to adulthood. Of that 25% of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies 60% will be aborted, the normal number won't make it to full term say 20%. (15% is the accepted figure plus another 3% after 8 weeks, 20% BBC)
- So in 1 million total pregnancies UU go down from 250K to 100K to 80K whereas the planned wanted go down from 500K to 400K and unplanned but wanted from 250K to 200K. So that makes unplanned and unwanted births 80K out of 680K births ie 12%.
- Even if through proper family planning we erradicate UU births some of those parents now that they don't have a UU child will go on to have a planned child when the time is right. What could that be ? 20% of the 80K seems reasonable meaning 16K extra births and even if not successful they'll try again. So we get. 400K PW + 200K UW + 16K =616K 680K down to 616K = a drop of 10%

Whole ecological footprint vs CO2 footprint - This is my own partictular drum not only is there so much bad maths around when it comes to cliimate the perspective is wrong. Climate is a small thing like worrying about the sofa when your whole house is being knocked down)

UN say 135m births per year =370K per day 10%=13.5m per year or 37K/day