America’s Silent Killer:
60.4 Million Lives Lost!
It may sound like a scenario from a super-secret nuclear contingency plan, but a silent killer has already eliminated a population equivalent to that of America's 87 largest cities. Over 60 million Americans have vanished without a trace!
Yet, according Dennis Howard, who heads The Movement for a Better America, “Amazingly, the vast majority of Americans hardly seem to notice. This is not some imaginary nuclear contingency plan. It is in fact the cumulative impact of 49 years of abortion on demand.”
It all started -- not with Roe v. Wade -- but with Colorado in 1967, California in 1968, and New York in 1970. Even before Roe came along in 1973, more than 2 million "legal" abortions had already occurred.
MBA doesn’t make these numbers up. They are based on data collected by the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood. “We simply take the most recent data and project it through the current period. Otherwise, there would always be a 2-3 year lag in the estimates.”
In Howard's view, “Nothing has inflicted more permanent damage on our society than abortion. 60 million abortions is 50 times more than all the fatalities from all the wars in our nation’s history, including the ravages of the war on terrorism and the tragedy of September 11. Yet these numbers never seem to make the headlines.”
Howard, who began his own journalism career as an investigative reporter in 1950, blames the media for their self-imposed censorship on the abortion issue. “Political correctness is nothing more than censorship imposed by the worst kind of emotional intimidation, the intimidation of our whole people. One child disappearing will make the Evening News, but the abortion industry can kill more people in one day than we lost on 9/11, and that fact never gets a mention.”
”Imagine if we had already lost 17,000,000 people in the so-called war on terror,” he said. “That’s how many children we have lost to abortion since 9/11. Yet those who mourn their loss are the exceptions.”
He cites a number of reasons for public apathy about the abortion toll. “Republicans don't make much noise about this,” he said, “because it is an embarrassing fact that there were almost as many abortions during George Bush’s 8-year term as there were during President Clinton’s. Clinton promised to ‘make abortion rare,’ but he didn’t. Bush could have used this same theme to reduce abortion more aggressively, but he didn’t.”
Sadly, even some pro-life leaders are prone to treat the numbers lightly, quoting data that is as much as five years out of date or routinely accepting the built-in lag in Guttmacher reporting. Few even count the 2 million abortions that occurred before Roe v. Wade. We are one of the few voices -- and the earliest -- to translate the toll into the disastrous economic impact. Our research began in 1992 and we have been a persistent voice on this topic since 1995.
Howard continued: “I find it hard to understand how any president can rationalize this enormous diversion of resources from what is really killing America. If President Bush had used his bully pulpit more, the number of abortions would be declining by a lot more than 1.5% a year. Unfortunately, the hue and cry is not yet loud enough.”
“The consequences of this loss are enormous, yet we seem blind to them,” he said. “It is time we faced the social, economic and spiritual impact of 60 million missing unborn Americans. That's 30 percent of the entire generation under 49. It is also equivalent to nearly 80% of all the babies born during the Baby Boom from 1945 to 1963.”
“The only thing that is likely to change any of this is a dramatic change of heart on the part of the average American,” Howard added. "My hope is that the current economic crisis -- which merely reflects our demographic crisis -- will wake us up to reality. If the Baby Boom drove our economy to new peaks in the last half of the 20th Century, perhaps we'll realize that our demographic crisis is driving the current recession."
“Politics alone can’t change this because of the extreme polarization between the two major parties,” he said. “That started when the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade by edict, instead of allowing normal democratic processes to deal with the issue. That decision split the country in three – left, right, and confused middle. So now we have politics by sound bite and bumper sticker instead of healthy, honest political dialogue.”
He continued, “People don’t seem to realize what a great loss to our Republic that is. Basically, the silent majority in the middle who don’t want to get involved in the left-right food fight have been effectively disenfranchised. The only way to change it is by changing the culture through education and communication. Basically, the silent majority has to regain its voice and get their country back.”
“In some ways, we’re like the ‘good Germans’ during World War II who never seemed to realize that there was a brutal holocaust going on,” Howard said.
Howard blames public apathy on the fact that the abortion industry operates behind a veil of protected secrecy. “Unlike the Germans, we don’t have industrial-scale concentration camps operating two miles out of town.
Only 1 in 15,000 American women have an abortion on any given day, so few peope even notice. But if you multiply that by 365 days a year for 49 years, the total number becomes astronomical.”
Howard has been tracking the economic and demographic impact of the continuing abortion toll since 1992, when the count first reached 30.5 million. Even then, the numbers impressed Howard, a former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and market research consultant.
“The economic loss may be the least of our problems,” he said. “Abortion has also desensitized large parts of our population to sex, violence, and predation against children. It is part of the same breakdown in values that has caused the breakdown of the family. Just look at what is shown on television every night. No wonder the rest of the world wonders what is going wrong in America.”
"We thought we could simply repeal the moral law as if actions had no consequences. We might as well have tried to repeal the law of gravity."
Howard’s market research background led him to conclude that abortion has had a greater economic impact than a major nuclear war.
“The human loss from abortion is the same as if our 87 largest cities had been flattened in a nuclear attack with no survivors. Yet even Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a 67% survival rate.” he said. “The only difference is that a nuclear war would be a dramatic, cataclysmic event, while abortions take place one at a time in the sanitized privacy of a medical clinic.”
”Nevertheless,” he said, “the long range impact on America's human resources is no different. We measure the economic impact of other things like this all the time – from alcoholism and drug addiction to AIDS and cancer. But the economic impact of losing even one baby is far greater than when someone dies after a long life.”
A few of the more obvious repercussions include:
Social Security: If half of the 55 million kids we aborted were working today, they would be contributing an additional $103 billion a year into the Social Security trust fund.
Taxes: The downstream loss in future tax revenues from abortion currently exceeds $25 trillion dollars. “Someone else will have to pay those taxes.”
Labor shortages: There is a looming shortage of labor in critical fields such as nursing, teaching and even the military. “We’re raiding countries like the Philippines for nurses today, and using citizenship as an incentive for immigrants to fill the ranks of the military. Where will that leave us in a major military crisis?”
Huge Gross Domestic Product losses: Every baby we abort today costs $55,000 a year in lost GDP. Over a lifetime, that projects to more than $25 million for every child who is aborted this year -- or over $54 trillion in lost GDP since the abortion boom began. By 2050, that will soar to $500 trillion adjusted for normal growth.
We can't upsize America by "downsizing" the next generation. But guess who will pay: the next generation! Today's under-49 generation will be paying for escalating government spending for the next 40 to 80 years, but their numbers have been cut in half by abortion and aggressive use of birth control. Without dramatic cuts in spending, we're headed for national bankruptcy. I predicted that long before today's financial crisis.
“The labor vacuum created by abortion on demand is also related to the illegal immigration crisis,” Howard claims. “Ross Perot had it wrong: The giant sucking sound was really the sound of illegals crossing the border from the south, much more than jobs heading the other way. Right now, apples and peaches can rot on the ground in Oregon and Washington because there aren't enough workers to pick them, even with illegal immigration. The price of fresh fruit has already gone sky high.”
The end of the Youth Market. “The 30% bite that abortion took out of the youth market is a major reason for the drop in daily newspaper circulation as well as increased competition for young audiences by other media. By supporting abortion on demand, the liberal media are literally killing their own future audiences.”
The shortage of vocations. “With smaller families,” Howard said, “parents are less willing to give up a son or daughter to the priesthood, the ministry or religious life, so we are turning to third world countries for vocations. Abortion has cost the Catholic church alone an inestimable number of priestly vocations, without even attempting to account for the crisis of faith that has followed in its wake."
“In the end,” he said, “the moral and spiritual harm we are doing to ourselves may be far more important than the economic loss.”
A list of the top 87 cities, whose population is equivalent to the loss from abortion, follows:
They include: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Dallas, San Antonio, Detroit, San Jose, Indianapolis, San Francisco , Jacksonville, Columbus, Austin TX, Memphis, Baltimore , Milwaukee, Boston, Charlotte NC, El Paso, Washington, DC, Seattle, Fort Worth, Denver, Nashville, Portland, OR, Oklahoma City, and Las Vegas.
They also include: Tucson, Long Beach CA, Cleveland, Albuquerque, Fresno, Kansas City MO, Sacramento, Virginia Beach VA, Mesa AZ, Atlanta, Oakland CA, Raleigh, Omaha, Tulsa, Honolulu, Minneapolis, Miami, Colorado Springs, Wichita, Arlington TX, Santa Ana, St. Louis, Anaheim, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Bakersfield, CA, Aurora, CO, New Orleans, Riverside, CA, Tampa, Stockton, CA, Toledo, Corpus Christi, and Lexington-Fayette, KY.
The latest additions include: St. Paul, MN, Anchorage, AK, Newark, NJ, Buffalo, NY, Plano, TX, Henderson, NV, Lincoln, NE, and Ft. Wayne, IN, Durham, NC, St. Petersburg, FL, Greensboro, NC, Irvine, CA, Laredo and Lubbock, TX, Madison, WI, Gilbert, AZ, Norfolk, VA, and Reno, NV. The toll keeps mounting.
Time to Raise
a Great Hue & Cry!
60 million abortions is an incredible waste of human lives and resources. And yet, for lack of a broad moral consensus, the banal evil of abortion continues. The question is: why?
Our courts have made it easy to avoid the responsibility of parenthood and marriage. For $250 or more, a man can avoid 21 years of child support -- and the commitment of marriage -- while the young woman has to live with the emotional and spiritual scars of post-abortion syndrome for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, no fault divorce has cost nearly two generations of children the love and attention of both parents.
Meanwhile, political correctness has silenced or immobilized far too many of us from speaking out or taking constructive action. And yet the most effective thing anyone can do to end this plague -- preventive education designed to guide young people meet the challenges that face them -- is neglected by those who could take it on in the nation's churches, schools, and caring institutions.
The answer is for all of us to speak -- often and insistently -- to our friends, relatives, neighbors and community and political leaders. Use the features in this section to stimulate discussion in your church and community. Copy and email them to your friends, neighbors and fellow church members. Bring them to the attention of your local media and political leaders.
Remember the words of Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
Use the donation button below to register your support for our ongoing campaign to change hearts and minds about abortion. Only a concerted, compassionate campaign to educate people about the consequences of abortion can change this picture. And especially the hearts and minds of those in the most vulnerable 15 - 35 age group, where most abortions occur.
To donate, just mail your donation to:
Movement for a Better America, Inc,
PO Box 472, Mt. Freedom, NJ 07970.
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