Abortion and COVID-19: two pandemics in numbers

Since 1973, there have been 61.628.584 abortions in America, a pandemic on an unprecedented scale

There is a reason Mark Twain wrote that the three untruths were "lies, damned lies and statistics". Once you get past the above numbers, you can count on your 10 fingers, which start to get abstract. Without counting them first, try to imagine an image of up to 12 people in your head. Now count how many people are actually in your photo. My guess is that at least half of you will have imagined less or more.

As the numbers increase, they become more abstract. I remember, many years ago, sitting at a Saturday night mass, struck by how few people were in church compared to its size. I estimated there were 40 people there but, sitting in the back row, I decided to do a count. It was actually 26.

Now I know what the late Senator Everett Dirksen might have meant with the aphorism popularly attributed to him: "a billion here and a billion there, and soon there is talk of real money".

Let me talk about other numbers today and try to make them less abstract.

Let's talk about a COVID-19. Many people have died since last winter. How many is the subject of debate. The Centers for Disease Control says we passed the 200.000 mark in late September.

It is difficult to get a head around 200.000. So let's break it down.

If 200.000 deaths were to occur in a single year, there would have to be one death every three minutes (more precisely, about every 2 minutes and 38 seconds, but that's abstract).

This is a lot. The average American takes eight minutes to shower. So when he gets out of the shower, nearly three of his countrymen are dead.

Not being used to a pandemic and having been stuck for a long time, we are struck by the size of that number. Politicians are already seeking votes based on their "plans" to fight the killer contagion. We are worried. We'll talk about it.

Now, let's take a look at another number.

The National Committee for the Right to Life estimates the number of abortions in 2018-19 (statistics from the latest period can be extrapolated) at 862.320 per year. That figure seems correct, coinciding with Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute. They should know: it's their bread and butter (or salad and cabernet).

It is difficult to get a head around 862.000. So let's break it down.

If 862.000 deaths were to occur in a single year, there would have to be one death every half minute (precisely, about every 37 seconds, but that's abstract).

This is a lot. We are very sensitive to the way COVID is ravaging America. But when one death from COVID occurs, four have occurred from abortion and a fifth is ongoing.

Or to put it another way, when you step out of your regular shower, there are nearly three deaths from COVID and nearly 13 from miscarriage.

Having gotten used to the abortion pandemic, having lived with it for 47 years, we have stopped thinking about that number. Politicians even seek votes based on their "plans" to expand it. We are not worried. We don't talk about it.

Consider this comparison: If all Americans who have died of COVID to date were to die with the pace and frequency of abortion, the abortion toll it takes until December 31 to reach would be reached by COVID on March 29.

Pro-abortionists, of course, will ignore this confrontation. They would claim that I am mixing apples and oranges, because there are no "deaths" from abortion, even if they rigidly refuse to talk about when human life begins and certainly reject the scientific fact that it begins at conception.

For people willing to listen to science rather than ideology, these numbers should be chilling, especially when broken down by the abstract. Let's stop letting pro-abortion ideologues frame the debate.

As much as we have been affected by the COVID death toll, we are used to the abortion death toll because we have decided not to consider it a national pandemic.

Allow me to offer another breakdown of the abstract into the concrete. Since 1973, there have been 61.628.584 abortions in America. It's as abstract as Senator Dirksen's budgets!

Well, let me materialize that number. I'm a hardened New Jersey guy who loves the Northeast. Do you know how big 61.628.584 are?

Imagine there wasn't a single person - not a single person - in each of these states: Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. To match the number of abortions in America since 1973 to our population, you couldn't have a single person in the 10 states between Washington, DC and Maine.

Imagine each of these cities completely empty: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Boston, Newark, Hartford, Wilmington, Providence, Buffalo, Scranton, Harrisburg, and Albany - the entire BosWash corridor.

For those of you who aren't fond of the Northeast, let me sketch it on another scale: To match the American abortion crop since 1973 against the US population, you couldn't have a single person living in California, Oregon, Washington. , Nevada and Arizona. None west of Utah.

Imagine if we started talking, especially during this election season, about abortion as the pandemic - the metastasized pandemic - is it?