The Bloodshed of the Twentieth Century
When the record of our time is written, it will be a record of bloodshed on a scale previously unimaginable across the history of mankind. The heart of that bloodshed is the war carried out by the born against the unborn. The victims of this war are a class of persons constrained within the wombs of their mothers, and they live without sight, sound, or voice. The disability that unites them is their incapacity to lift a finger in their own defense.
Other great moral evils exist, of course, but abortion is unique in targeting the most helpless members of our society. Our bloodlust has never before found a class of victims so utterly vulnerable. For this reason abortion’s bloodshed dwarfs every other bloodshed. How we repent of this bloodshed is thus the greatest moral issue of our time, and this repentance or its absence will be predictive of our repentance of a multitude of other moral evils of our age. Infanticide, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide are of the same moral fabric as our slaughter of little ones.
Some speak of this genocide as being on the decline today. This is false. Across the world, abortions are not falling, but rising. The United Kingdom’s premier medical journal The Lancet reports abortions currently stand at 73.3 million per year.8 Based on that figure alone, we are killing 1 percent of the world’s population each year—but we note this estimate excludes those babies aborted in their first week of life. To facilitate the murder of these babies, our medical authorities have (as we will see) declared that babies in the first week of life are not yet living beings.
Abortion’s slaughter is staggering. Reading such estimates, we ask if it is possible we have murdered billions of babies? How can this be? Why did we not know this number? How did we get here? Who is responsible? What can be done about it?
The beginning of answering these questions is to take a step back.
Jonathan Bearak et al., “Unintended Pregnancy and Abortion by Income, Region, and the Legal Status of Abortion: Estimates from a Comprehensive Model for 1990–2019,” The Lancet Global Health 8, no. 9 (September 1, 2020): e1152–e1161, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30315-6.↩︎