For the fourth year in a row abortion was the leading cause of death world-wide —more than 44 million babies were lost. By comparison, “the number of abortions nearly quadrupled the number of deaths from infectious diseases in 2022,” Ryan Foley reported for the Christian Post.
“Worldometer, a database that keeps track of statistics about health, the global population and other metrics in real-time, continuously compiles information about the number of abortions worldwide,” Foley wrote. “The last available snapshot of the Worldometer from 2022, captured on Dec. 31 by the internet archiving tool The Wayback Machine, shows that more than 44 million abortions took place last year.”
Communicable diseases were the second leading cause of death in 2022—13 million. Foley compared the toll taken by abortion which almost staggers the imagination and dwarfs all other causes.
“The deaths attributed to infectious diseases as well as the more than 8 million deaths caused by cancer, the approximately 5 million fatalities triggered by smoking, the roughly 2.5 million alcohol-related deaths and the nearly 2 million deaths caused by AIDS this year combined add up to less than the number of lives lost to abortion in 2022.
Not surprisingly, abortion is the leading cause of death in the United States.
“In the USA, where nearly 30% of pregnancies are unintended and 40% of these are terminated by abortion, there are between 1,500 to 2,500 abortions per day,” Worldometers reports. “Nearly 20% of all pregnancies in the USA (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. Guttmacher Institute reports 930,160 abortions performed in 2020 in the United States, with a rate of 14.4 per 1,000 women.”
The total number of deaths worldwide in 2022 was just over 67 million, a figure that does not include the number of abortions. “But if it did, the number of worldwide deaths in 2022 would exceed 100 million,” Foley wrote. “The total world population at the end of 2022 came in at slightly above 8 billion.”
Specifically, there were 42.4 million abortions in 2019; nearly 44 million abortions in 2020; and approximately 44 million abortions in 2021. The million abortions in 2021. The 2022 death toll from abortion was slightly higher.
REACH PRO-LIFE PEOPLE WORLDWIDE! Advertise with LifeNews to reach hundreds of thousands of pro-life readers every week. Contact us today.
While Worldometer cites a fact sheet from the World Health Organization as the source for its abortion statistics, the global organization has a considerably higher death toll. Its fact sheet estimates that “Around 73 million induced abortions take place worldwide each year.” The World Health Organization characterizes abortion as an essential health service.
Deaths caused by the coronavirus pandemic “were measured at 1,209,570 in a separate set of statistics compiled by Worldometer.”
Foley added
Additional leading causes of death identified by the Worldometer include road traffic accident fatalities, which claimed more than 1 million lives last year, and suicides, numbering slightly more than 1 million. Over 800,000 people lost their lives due to water-related diseases last year, half a million people died because of the seasonal flu, nearly 400,000 people died of malaria and around 300,000 women died during childbirth.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in his National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
