Since this just came up recently, the claim caught my eye. I don't know what AI was used in that claim that is going around on social media, but I ran it through Claude as follows: "Help me check this statistic that is going around: Women since the 191h Amendment have aborted 5-10 times as many babies as all the men have killed in all the wars and murders over the same time. Leaving aside all the ways in which the comparison is problematic,* does the statistic hold water as a bare factual claim?"
Claude has a more nuanced response than this one:
Short answer: no. Not because it's too aggressive, but because it isn't a number that falls out of any consistent scoping. Depending on how you define the denominator, the true ratio is either three to six times *larger* than claimed, or less than 1.**The numerator.** Cumulative U.S. abortions since Roe are reasonably well documented: roughly 66.1 million from 1973 through 2025, built from CDC surveillance and Guttmacher provider censuses. The widely circulated 63,459,781 figure comes from National Right to Life tracking the same two sources, current to about 2021. The 1920–1972 portion is the weak leg: the standard 1955 estimate of 200,000–1,200,000 illegal abortions per year rested on qualitative assumptions, and a range that wide over five decades means the pre-Roe addition could be anywhere from ~5 million to ~40 million. Call the full-period total 66–100 million with genuine uncertainty in the upper half.**The denominator, U.S.-scoped.** Since the 19th Amendment is a U.S. fact, the natural like-for-like comparison is U.S. war deaths plus U.S. homicides:| | Deaths ||---|---|| WWII | 405,399 || Korea | 36,574 || Vietnam | 58,220 || Gulf War | 382 || Iraq + Afghanistan + GWOT | ~7,100 || **All U.S. war deaths since 1920** | **~508,000** || U.S. homicides, 1920–2025 (est.) | ~1.5 million || **Total** | **~2.0 million** |The homicide figure is mine, built from decade-average rates against decade-average population — roughly 9 per 100,000 in the Prohibition years, near 4.5–5.0 in the 1950s, a peak of 10.2 in 1980 and 9.8 in 1991, and 5–7 since. It's good to maybe ±15%, which doesn't matter at this scale.That gives a ratio of about **32 to 1**, not 5–10 to 1. On its own terms the claim substantially understates itself.**The other scoping.** If "all the wars" means all wars everywhere, the denominator explodes. WWII alone killed an estimated 70–85 million, and one aggregate estimate puts 20th-century war deaths near 110 million, with others running to 130–142 million including civilians. Add global homicides (~440,000/year currently, so tens of millions cumulative) and you're at roughly 120–160 million. Against 66 million U.S. abortions, abortions are the *smaller* number — ratio about 0.5. The claim fails in the opposite direction.Global-versus-global lands back in the same neighborhood as the U.S. comparison: global induced abortions currently run about 73 million a year, so the cumulative figure is in the billions and the ratio is again in the tens.**Verdict.** The "5–10x" is the one answer no consistent pairing produces. It reads like a hedge — someone with a sense that the number was very large, picking a multiplier that sounded defensible. If you want to use the underlying comparison, the U.S.-vs-U.S. version is the only internally coherent one, and the honest figure is roughly 30-to-1, with a caveat that the pre-1973 leg is an estimate resting on 1950s guesswork rather than data.One measurement note that isn't just framing: homicide totals count victims, not male perpetrators. Since men commit roughly 88% of U.S. homicides, correcting for that shrinks the denominator slightly rather than growing it — it doesn't rescue the ratio.
Emphasis added. O.J. had nothing on this.
* There are many of these ways in which the comparison is problematic. In addition, the comparison leaves out justification entirely: some homicides are clearly justified and even proper, and some wars can be, and some abortions are on most ethical schema if they are necessary to save the life of the mother in a case where both the mother and child will otherwise die. (The exception is the Catholic standard of 'never actively choose and perform an evil action,' where the killing of an innocent is always evil; the Church argues that it is morally better not to take on performing the evil action even though it results in letting both die instead of saving the one who can be saved. I dissent from that teaching.)
Still, here as elsewhere sorting out the problematic issues with the comparison doesn't save abortion's bacon. Even in an unjust war, the enemy one might have killed was probably trying to kill you; even in gang violence, the other gang likely was. The abortions not only happen on a vaster scale, they always target the morally innocent.