If a number like “55 million” is hard to grasp, think of it this way—if you added together the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, and San Francisco, you would only have about 26.1 million people—less than half the number aborted.
Looked at in this way, it’s easier to understand just how many missing people “55 million” represents.
Yet the tremendous number of lives taken here actually pales in comparison to the number of human lives wiped out in other countries, where abortion has been legal for longer and Christianity sidelined more readily.
In the former Soviet Union, where abortion for medical reasons was declared legal in 1955 and abortion for any reason was legalized in 1968, the number of abortions was approximately 113.2 million through 1980—a profoundly staggering number.
As recently as 2008, abortion was still “the common method of birth control” in Russia.
Starting from a ban on abortion and projecting forward just a few decades, it’s very difficult to grasp the magnitude of this human, demographic, and moral tragedy. Over time the de facto meaning of words like “medical necessity” has become “abortion on demand.” Might we be headed down the same path? Many today seem to be engaged in a form of moral and demographic solipsism—pretending or denying the reality that a loss of human life on this scale will have no effect.
Some abortion advocates these days fight to prevent women from seeing ultrasound images of the babies they carry. Some will not even discuss the enormous numbers of unborn children dying each year or the cumulative total of humans lost to abortion in the United States.
In Russia—the largest nation on earth geographically—the population is down to an estimated 140 million, shrinking by several million each year. Put bluntly, they are killing themselves faster than they are replacing themselves. Immigration—legal or illegal—aside, do we really want to continue down this path toward national genocide?
In 2006, Russian President Vladimir Putin referred to the falling birthrate—a consequence of high abortion—as “the most acute problem of contemporary Russia.” The same pattern is occurring in Spain, Italy, and most other European nations.
With the ramifications of unfettered abortion on demand so undeniably clear, why aren’t we learning from our mistakes?
Shouldn’t we pursue life for a change?