Youth Blog

By now, you’ve probably already seen the number floating around on the internet. But just how catastrophic is it? I mean, it’s shocking… but how shocking should it be?

A couple of weeks ago, several media outlets covered the devastating news that abortion was the number one cause of death in 2018, with figures ranging from 41 million to 42 million worldwide. 42 million!

Now, maybe you are like me, and had a hard time conceptualizing this number – there aren’t many instances in my life where I experience the gravity of 42 million, and as a result, I had a hard time understanding its true value. So I decided to find some additional statistics that I could use as a reference point.

According to the Canada Free Press, the number of deaths due to abortion in 2018 is more than all of the deaths from cancer, malaria, HIV/AIDS, smoking, alcohol and traffic accidents combined! More specifically, 8.2 million died of cancer in 2018, 5 million from smoking and 1.7 million from HIV/AIDS.

Now, what shocked me most about these statistics is the fact that, from the volume of advertisements produced to raise awareness of cancer, smoking and the AIDS pandemic, I would have expected the death toll to be a lot closer to that of abortion, or at least in the double digits. Even their combined total comes nowhere near the 42 million.

And so, I persisted in my search, finding that the disparity between the numbers was so vast that, again, I still couldn’t really grasp the true meaning of the 42 million.

When I started gathering data from the World Health Organization (WHO), the genocidal nature of this year’s leading cause of death started to really hit home.

The most recent data available on the WHO website is from 2016. It states, that in 2016, 56.9 million people died in total. That’s only 14.9 million more deaths than those caused solely by abortion in 2018. 30.7 million of those 2016 deaths, more than half (54%), were due to the top ten causes of death, which means that abortion, as the single, leading cause of death in 2018, blows past that total by 11.3 million. That’s 10 causes of death versus 1.

The fact that a single cause of death only comes 14.9 million shy of meeting the total death toll of a previous, very recent, year is utterly mind-blowing. And yet, trying to get others to recognize the passing of these individuals remains a challenge: How do you convince someone who doesn’t acknowledge a person’s life to acknowledge their death? Without life, there is no death. If someone is intent on closing their eyes to the life before them, then they likely will not open them for their death. However, there is still hope. The magnitude of these numbers might not be enough to wake the most fervent pro-abortion activist, but it might be startling enough to shake the apathetic.