62,502,904 Babies Have Been Killed by Abortion Since Roe v. Wade in 1973

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Jan 22, 2021   |   10:18AM   |  

The United States marks 48 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 an estimated 62,502,904 abortions that have destroyed the lives of unborn children.

A new analysis published by the National Right to Life Committee indicated there have been an estimated 61,628,584 abortions since the Supreme Court handed down its 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision allowing virtually unlimited abortions.

NRLC education director Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon provides the figures 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 not tabulated accurate numbers of abortions for over a decade because not every state accurately reports to it. 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.

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The good news is abortions have been on a declining trend in the United States for years. As O’Bannon explains:

The latest reliable national annual figure we have comes from the Guttmacher Institute which, although pro-abortion, does the most complete data gathering. For the year 2017, Guttmacher estimated the number of abortions performed in the U.S. was 862,320.

That is the lowest figure Guttmacher has reported since 1973 when the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide. That number is just a bit more than half of what the toll was in 1990 when Guttmacher recorded more than 1.6 million abortions.

Here’s how the long-time pro-life researcher arrives at the total abortion figure since Roe:

We have used that 2017 Guttmacher figure to project equivalent numbers for 2018, 2019, and 2020 and then used those in tallying the cumulative number of abortions since Roe.

An additional 3% is added to totals from 1973 through 2014, reflecting a 3-5% undercount Guttmacher has estimated for those figures.

Another 12,000 abortions were added for each year since 2015 to reflect the caseload of “providers” Guttmacher says it may have missed in its 2015-2017 counts.

That data added together yields a cumulative total of 62,502,904 abortions since 1973. This is more that the population our country’s most populous state (California) and a number greater than the combined population of our 23 least populous states.

The bad news is that the loss of life since Roe is staggering. And O’Bannon puts that terrible tragedy in a comparative form that makes it easier to understand just how many human beings abortion has eliminated.

To get another take on the enormity of that loss, a nation with a population of 62.5 million would rank about twenty third on the list of the world’s most populous countries.

In terms of population, a nation that size would rank ahead of such countries as Italy, Spain, Kenya, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Argentina, Columbia, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Cambodia, South Korea, or Canada.

Nothing has ever killed more people in America — or worldwide — than abortion. Protecting babies from abortions is the single greatest human rights cause in human history. And every American who believes unborn babies are human beings who has a right to life must stand up every day and speak for their rights until abortion is eliminated.