The Alan Gutmacher Institute has released a new set of numbers that shows that abortions in 2002 (the most recent numbers that are apparently available) are at their lowest number since 1976.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that they are still, to me, staggeringly high.
Here are the numbers: 1.29 million abortions in 2002 – 242 abortions out of every 1000 pregnancies that didn’t end in miscarriage.
That’s a lot. That’s entirely too many. In 2002, there were just a bit over 4 million babies born in the US. If you were an unborn child in the US then, this means that you had about a 1 in 5 chance of dying at the hand of your own mother, other types of pre-birth deaths aside.
Does that reflect well on our nation – on our sense of giving everyone a fair chance to make the very best life for themselves they can? Or does it show that we’re capable, and quite willing, to write off a very alrge number of us even before we’re born?
For years I’ve heard the abortion rights mantra of “safe, legal, and rare”. We have the first two parts of that naild down, and they’ve ben that way for some time. But we seem to be dragging our feet on the third and I’m at a loss to understand why that’s so.
Look, I’m not one of those people in the “holocaust of the unborn camp” but these numbers give me pause and I think they ought to do the same to all of us. Something bad is happening in our country and, by and large, we don’t seem all that exorcised about it. Perhaps it’s time we got serious about making abortions truly rare.
