Abortion Kills More

The Harvest:

Today featured some news that has had me wondering.

Abortion kills more black Americans than the seven leading causes of death combined, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 2005, the latest year for which the abortion numbers are available.

Abortion killed at least 203,991 blacks in the 36 states and two cities (New York City and the District of Columbia) that reported abortions by race in 2005, according to the CDC. During that same year, according to the CDC, a total of 198,385 blacks nationwide died from heart disease, cancer, strokes, accidents, diabetes, homicide, and chronic lower respiratory diseases combined. These were the seven leading causes of death for black Americans that year.

That doesn't hold for the general population, wherein heart disease alone kills more than abortion. Still, it reminded me of a comment douglas made on the recent evolution post. He wrote:

[Life span statistics for the middle ages] tend to be a bit misleading, as the infant mortality and childhood disease mortality rates were so much higher, it drives the curve down aggressively. If you made it to twenty five, you had good odds of living to at least sixty or better.

That's right, of course; but I wonder what it would do to our "life span" statistics if we included the aborted as if they were really people.

We ought to do so, shouldn't we? A major part of the rationale for abortion-on-demand is that it allows us to focus resources on the woman and her "wanted" children, rather than on "unwanted" ones who would burden the system. ("Every child a wanted child," the slogan goes.) Thus, by eliminating these people at age zero, we're focusing more "health care" resources on the remnant. By excluding the aborted from the calculation, we're masking that cost from our understanding of where our culture really stands. The aborted child is helping to 'pay the freight' for the rest of us, because all the resources she would have used are free to be applied to the rest of us.

(An aside -- this is, I suppose, the opposite of Mrs. Palin's death panels. Here you have pushed the life-or-death decision making wholly onto a single individual, with the government taking a completely-hands-off approach. I've argued with regard to the 'death panels' that it's better if families make these decisions than if government does, deciding with love how to balance these difficult cost-to-benefit choices at the end of life. At the beginning of life, though, these statistics make clear that hundreds of thousands of would-be mothers a year stand ready to eliminate a child they ought to love, but don't "want." I suppose we should figure that into our discussion for the end-of-life too: why wouldn't people who choose 'lifestyle' over 'baby' also choose 'lifestyle' over 'grandma'? In some cases, it could be that government death panels could be grandma's only hope!)

To return to the point, however: I lack the mathematical skill to cruch the numbers with precision, but I think it would be interesting. What is America's life expectancy, calculated to account for those we choose to deny life as well as those we choose to support?