No matter how you look at abortion, whether you are an extreme pro-lifer that you are an abolitionist (like myself and the guys at Apologia Radio, end abortion now) or you believe in killing babies in the womb up to the point of birth, the numbers say that over 60 million lives were on their way to being lived and never made it. They never made it because of the will or choice of the mother to not want to be a mother and instead, take the life she had created and was creating. In some ways, I wish I could put this point first before the wars, but to do the calculations after talking about all the men who died in the wars on America’s behalf, it is much more powerful and effective to show how many more lives were lost not by foreign “enemies'' but by one's own mother. (Sorry, I am an abolitionist if you can’t tell. I had to take my chance to jab.)
The calculations for this are a bit more aloof, but we can discuss it. It is not like 60 million people were killed in the 1970s; this has been the accumulation of killings over about 50 years. It is also not like it is the same number of people being killed every year. If the rumor is true, the number of abortions is down from where they were in the past per year. Either way, most conservative commentators estimate that about a million babies are killed every year. For the sake of simplicity, let's do the numbers, assuming that it has been a million a year this whole time, which is not far off if Roe vs. Wade was passed in 1973, so we have not hit 50 years yet, and we are at 60 million. So a million is a conservative estimate, because in order to get 60 million, we must have had years over a million, much more to get more million than the years. Wikipedia defines Gen. X as about 1965-1980. Pew Research puts Millennials as 1981-1996. (barely a Millennial myself, born in 94) So let’s break up the generations to make things easy. So 7 years of Gen. X from 1973-1980 and 8 years from the Millennials from 1981 to 1988, thus giving us 15 years of abortions. So going back to our assumed million abortions a year and multiply that by 15 years, we have the first generation of abortions being done on record. (As you can see above, the normal generation is 15 years, even though it is technically between generations, we can call this abortion Gen 1). Assuming these babies went on to have, on average, two kids, we would have not only lost those 15 million, but we would have lost the 30 million kids they did not have. Those who were born in 1973 are now 48 years old. So let’s say that they had their first kid at 21; that kid would be 27 now; thus, they would be in the early (modern day early) baby having window. As of now, those kids that were not born because their parents were aborted in 1973 and thus they were never conceived in 1994 (alongside me) are not having their first or second kid. So already within one generation, of aborted babies, of compounded lives lost, we’re about to hit our third generation, and the numbers are adding up. The baby that was killed initially was 15 million, they did not have their 2 kids; thus, 30 million more were not born, and those 30 million are not having their first kid, which is another 30 million. If we assume the eventual 2 kid average, we have a whopping 60 million kids not being born in the 2010s and 2020s because of the initial generation. Thus, the number of lives lost because of the first generation being snuffed out equals the total lives killed by their mothers since Roe vs. Wade. The saddest thing is this number is going to keep growing.
In order to see this to its end, we can go ahead and hit a hundred years, just to see how much of a poison this thing is in America. (btw, I am not normally a numbers guy. I like talking abstracts and inductive reasoning, but this stuff is mind-blowing if you actually start doing the numbers.) We have 33 years from where we left off in 1988 to 2021. Let us do the math of Abortion Generation 2, 1988-2003. Assuming that people start having their first kid after the age of 25, that makes multiplying this calculation stop after 1996. So 8 more years of 8 million babies being killed and those people, having let's say, only 1 kid, on average, for now. We have 8 million babies being aborted from 1988 to 1996 and those 8 million not having 1 kid, thus not having 8 million more. The rest of the generation would be the remaining 7 million from 1996 to 2003. So Abortion generation 2, as of general number calculations of 2021, is up to 23 million people not being born, putting us at a total of 15 million (first gen of first abortion gen.) + 30 million (second generation of first abortion Gen.) + 60 Million (third generation of first generation of abortion). Generation 1 grand total is 105 million. Second Generation total is 23 million. So in two generations of abortions, we have 128 million people being directly aborted, leading to a domino effect of a total of 128 million people not being born due to 30 years of abortions. Now we have 18 years left of abortions. Since we have no births among these people, it is straightforward 18 million people are not born as of 2021; given enough time, they would have kids because obviously, all these kids are 18 or younger.
So we have 48 years of stopping life in the womb. In that 48 years, assuming a million babies are aborted every year, on average, these people will go on to have 2 kids a year, and after 1996, no more kids will be born to the people born 1995 to now, we have a total of not just 60 million people being killed, but we have a total of 136 million people being killed. To add the final context to bring these millions of lives into context, let’s compare the lives lost to the lives gained during that time. So basically, let’s, look at the population of America in 1973 and the population currently in America to see how much population growth we have had in the same time, aka compare abortion rates to birth rates.
As we can see from this graph, the population in 1973 was almost 212 million, and in 2019, it was 328 million. In order to bridge the gap, lets add a million a year to get to 2021 (2018, the population grew a million and in 2017, it grew 2 million). So today, the total is about 330 million. So, from 1973 to 2021, the population grew by 118 million. This means that the total amount of lives lost to abortion via the domino of people not being born because the people who would have born them would not have been born themselves is greater than the amount of population growth in that time. Another way of putting it is 136 million (people lost since and due to abortion being legalized) is > than the lives gained in the American population in that same time, 118 million. If there were no abortions, and all things were assumed to be the same, we would be at a population of 466 million instead of the 330 million it is right now (330 million total today + the 136 million just calculated). Another way of looking at it in the graph below is to see that the number of people lost is greater than the total population of America in 1942.
So the centuries of immigration to America finally reached 136 million. We cut off more than that in only 48 years of abortions. We could choose to go for a total of 100 years, but that would easily be hundreds of millions of people killed, especially if the population continues to grow and the rate of abortions stays similar, we will have more abortions per year. In the last poison, we had barely 10 million lives lost and millions more not being part of serving one another inside the market. The poison of abortion is more than ten times worse and is only getting worse because the scale of it is growing. Most of the deaths we had with wars are the world wars; the worst part about that is the life years cut off, and multiple generations cut off from them versus, let's say, if the world wars had happened in this century. Now we are done with the two main people or life poisons America has drunk. Next, we will study the money poisons we have drank, which is similar to the lack of people because people’s lives are only as powerful as their work is able to buy them currency, and that currency is able to buy them buying power in the market. (The only difference between the people of first world countries and third world countries is the connection between work and currency.)
In 2020, I spent most of the year exposing myself to liberty minded people. I listened to thousands of hours of lectures, conversations, talk show radio, etc. I listened to all the different kinds of liberty-minded people: anarchist capitalist, anarchist communist, secular minarchist, Christian minarchist, objectivist, etc. I learned about the economic scholars of old and listened to conversations with the leaders of the liberty movement today.
After looking back, I realize there was a theme of 5 major areas where America has been detrimentally wounded in the past century in ways that we were not in the past century (at least not to the degree we are now, nowhere close). This series of articles is meant to be a pile on, a wake-up call to think about the things that have hurt us and that are still hurting us today.
Millions of men lost to war (People Poison)
Just think of all the lives that were never lived out. Millions of men did not come home to join the baby boom of WWII. Those children did not go on to have millennials (like myself), and then the millennials who were never born would never have had kids. (The conversation around Coronavirus has brought up a thing called “life years” ; it is how many years of life that person would have had left, assuming they lived to the normal old age of the time. So if someone dies from something at 68 and the normal average age of death is 75, they only lost 7 years. These men who were dying between 18 and 30 were losing dozens of life years on their own life and whole lifetimes of life years lost by their kids never being conceived.” According to Statista, over 626,000 American lives were lost (most of them in their prime) during all the wars from WWI to today. If you assume on average those men will go on to have an average of 2 kids, that adds another 1.2 million kids to the boomers. Take those same boomers and assume they have two kids on average, you get about 2.5 million more millennials/Gen. X. Assuming that those people go on to have an average of two kids, that is 5 million Generation Z kids. If you add all those people up, that is just shy of 9.4 million people.
The negative effect on the economy for not having these people is harmful to America. There would have been more houses built, more cars built, more grocery stores, books written, inventions made, etc. There would be more demand for all things, thus more supply of all things. For a planned economy under socialism, this is bad. This means having to factor in millions more lives into their calculations and into their choice on which goods they will focus on. For a capitalistic society, that means more innovation. This means more jobs created by places like Amazon, and it opens up the pie to more people competing for their share of the market. It means more options for us as the consumer as we serve each other through innovation that leads to creative destruction, aka bye bye Blockbuster and hello Netflix and everything that was inspired in post after Netflix was proven to work. My personal favorite is that there will be more highways and more complex cities with more infrastructure.
Tim is a Christian author. His worldview that informs his writing is Calvinist, Baptist, and Libertarian. His main series is his Christian picture book series, "About God for Kids", where he discusses the attributes of God in a way kids can digest. He also wrote a Christian Romance novel, libertarian book for beginners, and Christian coloring books. He graduated with a Bachelor's in Biblical Studies from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
He has written a book on freedom called “Are You Free” (If you are into listening to books I have it in audio also, Are You Free Audiobook )and he has written multiple children’s books about God. Be Sure to check out the podcast version of the blog, Labor for Truth Podcast. And check out “The Truth About” Youtube Channel. You can find his works at his amazon author page, https://amazon.com/author/timbankes. He even has a free digital ebook on how God is the creator. Get your free copy today at, Greater Creator .Also If you are into Christian Fiction, he has made his first book in his Futuristic Christian Fiction series free, Her Dying Wish
Some of my other favorite books on these subjects that are great for beginners to the liberty movement are:
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman (Major Economist)
Basics of Economics by Thomas Sowell (Major Economist)
Called to Freedom by Elise Daniels (Christian Perspective)
Faith Seeking Freedom by Norman Horn, Doug Stuart , Kerry Baldwin, Dick Clark (Christian Perspective)
The Libertarian Theology of Freedom by Edmund Opitz (Christian Perspective)