Historical Context

I was doing some research for a post I wrote entitled "The Raging Debate," and I came across an astonishing yet familiar stat: Roughly 50 million abortions occurred between Roe v. Wade and 2008 in America alone. Most of us have seen this stat before, but I find that it is really hard to wrap my mind around such a huge figure without some context. So here are a few historical figures to put the abortion numbers into perspective:

• According to this paper, under the fifth point, the Roman Empire, at its height, had between 60 and 100 million people. That means that abortion deaths in America total between 83 and 50 percent of the Ancient Roman Empire.
• The deaths in the American Revolution are hard to pin down, but this site (scroll down to "Cost of War/Casualties) roughly 53,000 people died in the war. That means American abortion has taken nearly 1,000 times as many lives as the war that gave birth to America.
• According to this site, the American Civil War resulted in the death of roughly 700,000 Americans. That means abortion has killed roughly 71 times as many Americans as that war
• According to this site, World War One was responsible for roughly 8.5 million military deaths. That works out to be 17 percent of the abortion toll.
• Remember the 180 video and the comparison to the Holocaust there? The Holocaust, according to this site, accounted for roughly 6 million Jewish deaths. Abortion has accounted for more than eight times that amount in America alone.
• According to this site, a total of 1,343,812 American soldiers have died in battle throughout history.  That's roughly three percent of the American abortion toll.
• This list (though it is from Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt) provides some excellent context. Using a figure of 50 million abortions, found here, abortion in the US could be placed as high as first or as low as fifth, depending on which figure you accept for each event.

The list could go on and on, but the bottom line is that abortion has killed more people than almost any other event in history. The Holocaust is decried as an atrocity, and justly so, but how can we ignore the atrocity right in front of our faces when it has eclipsed the death toll of Hitler's genocide? Abortion kills more than one million babies in the United States each year. We can't ignore it anymore.

In Christ,

Jacob