When does a LIFE (of any shade) begin to matter?
Recently while being confronted with the blaring and still growing death toll numbers from the Coronavirus Pandemic it occurred to me that the number of deaths, while horrific and large doesn’t even touch the number of aborted children lost to our world EVERY YEAR! I ran a quick search and found that the site worldometers.info actually claims to keep a running total of the number of abortions worldwide, which at the time of writing was 17,653,932. Of course, there is no actual running total of the number of abortions worldwide, as obviously there is a time gap between an actual abortion and it becoming statistically recorded. However, this site bases this number on the statistics collected by the World Health Organization and averages it out to reflect the average number of abortions per minute throughout any given day.
Sources and info:
- Sexual and reproductive health – World Health Organization (WHO)
- Shah, I.; Ahman, E. (December 2009). “Unsafe abortion: global and regional incidence, trends, consequences, and challenges” (Pdf). Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada 31 (12): 1149–58. PMID 20085681
This is a staggering number especially considering that we are not even halfway through this year! The Tanakh clearly states that there will be an accounting for the shedding of innocent blood and that even ANIMALS will be called to account if they take human life (Genesis 9:5)! Those statistics are not just numbers, they are living souls. They are 17 million pairs of eyes that will never open to see the wonder and the woe of the world we all take for granted. They are 17 million toothless smiles that will never take away the breath of any person lucky enough to be their recipient. They are 17 million first steps that will never be taken and 17 million first words that will never be uttered. erhaps most relvant to us as a glabal society they represnet 17 million possible lifesaving medicines or world changing technologies that will never be developed.
To put this number into perspective, the average NFL stadium seats about 60,000 people. So more than 283 football stadiums filled with tiny human beings- each with a distinct fingerprint and iris shade were wiped away silently while only 250,000ish people died of COVID-19 since January. It is not to say the deaths of COVID victims are not tragic and of course they all had family that is still in mourning for them. People are never just a number, not before birth and not after death. The COVID victims had a first step, a first smile, and a first word. Those unborn never will. While I am most decidedly NOT implying that there is a direct relationship between the two, one cannot help but be reminded, when pondering these numbers, that only last year the New York Senate stood up and clapped and cheered when legislation was passed that removed gestational limits on abortion, making it legal for women to kill their unborn child, even up to birth! Now that is not the reason that New York has the highest death toll in the USA, but it does give one pause to consider just why the deaths of the almost born are cause for applause while the deaths of our elderly and vulnerable are to be mourned and avoided at all costs. Sadly while the quarter-million (and counting) COVID-19 deaths may not have been preventable, these abortions largely are, as only a minute fraction of these abortions are medically necessary.
As I pointed out in my earlier post, if the judgments of the Torah were universally upheld in our world we wouldn’t have “wet markets” and viruses like this would seldom if ever make the cross-species jump from animal to human. If people followed the purity laws it would minimize the spread of such pathogens. More importantly, if we universally upheld the morals that are laid out in the Torah and thus valued ALL life even while still within the womb (See Exodus 21:22 which lays out a penalty for accidental harm to an unborn child) the COVID-19 outbreak would PALE in comparison to the ROEWADE-73 Plague that continues to claim the lives of tens of millions of innocent unborn lives every year around the world! By the time you read this post, there will undoubtedly be millions more erased. Each of us might ask ourselves… We have been quarantining for weeks and/or wearings masks to protect the elderly from COVID… what have we done to protect the unborn?