40 Years After Roe Vs. Wade, 28% Of Pregnancies End In Abortion

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court making abortion a “right,” and since that day there have been some 55 million abortions in America.

The United States marks 40 years of legalized abortion in all fifty states at any time for any reason throughout pregnancy on January 22nd, the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Since that time, there have been approximately 55,772,015 abortions that have destroyed the lives of unborn children.

An estimate published by the National Right to Life Committee this time in 2011 indicated there have been an estimated 54,559,615 abortions since the Supreme Court handed down its 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision allowing virtually unlimited abortions.

In the document, “Abortion Statistics: United States Data and Trends,” NRLC education director Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon estimates that there have been 54,559,615 abortions since 1973 based on data from both the Centers for Disease Control and the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, a former Planned Parenthood research arm. Guttmacher receives numbers directly from abortion centers themselves and is the prime source for more current figures because the Centers for Disease Control has never tabulated accurate numbers of abortions. The CDC relies on figures from state health departments, some of which rely on voluntary reporting — and it hasn’t had data from some states such as California and New Hampshire for more than a decade. …

The number means there are more than 3,300 abortions daily and 137 abortions per hour every hour in the United States. Translated another way, an abortion is done about every 30 seconds in the United States.

The analysis also found that the best estimate for the current number of annual abortions in the United States — involving both the surgical abortion procedure as well as the dangerous abortion drug RU 486 — is 1.2 million.

“To put this in perspective, consider the fact that the US had approximately 142,394,000 births for the first 39 years of Roe,” writes Ed Morrissey. “Assuming for the moment that 2012 added as many births as 2011, the number rises to 146.348 million. That means that abortions accounted for 28% of all known pregnancy outcomes in the US during this 40-year period. We literally threw away more than a quarter of human beings waiting to be born since Roe.”

That’s horrifying for anyone who believes that an unborn child in the womb is a person with an identifiable genetic identity. Which, of course, is scientific fact.

What may be the worst part of the abortion debate is how economic concerns seems to have trumped questions of ethics and morality. We don’t talk about whether or not it’s right to end the life of a child in the womb any more. We talk about the cost to society of allowing that child to live.

That’s dangerous territory, especially as we see government taking over more and more of health care. If we begin to let economic considerations trump the sanctity of human life than we are not safe whether we are at the very beginnings of our lives, the very end of our lives or just grievously ill some time in between those two points.

If we can abort an unborn child because that child might represent too much cost to the parents, or society, then why can’t we euthanize cancer patients or the elderly who might suck up too many health care resources? Is that a society we want to live in? One in which your life may be ended if you cost society too much?

We’d be one step away from executing the homeless and the mentally ill, too. That may sound absurd, but it’s the path we’ve put ourselves on.