Abortion is nation's leading cause of death, if counted, study finds
A recent University of North Carolina at Charlotte study shows the devastating consequences of abortion on minorities, revealing that voluntary infanticide is by far the leading cause of death for both blacks and Hispanics.
The paper, “Induced Abortion, Mortality, and the Conduct of Science,” was written by James Studnicki, Sharon J. Mackinnon, and John W. Fisher and was published in an online edition of the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The authors take issue with the fact that abortion deaths are not included among the nation’s mortality statistics, pointing out that abortion is the leading cause of death for Hispanics and African Americans, and that the 1,152,000 deaths from abortion in 2009 made it the nation’s leading cause of death, accounting for almost a third (32.1 percent) of all deaths recorded that year.
The authors reached that conclusion through the straightforward process of including abortion in the nation’s mortality statistics.
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“We considered induced abortion as the proximate cause of death and we subtracted the estimated number of natural fetal losses from the number of abortions to arrive at births averted by abortion,” they explain. ‘We used 2009 data because it was the most current year for which official group-specific fetal loss estimates were available from government sources.”
Perhaps the most impactful results of the study show that minorities are most affected by abortion, which the authors demonstrate using data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), and the Guttmacher Institute, which together show that of the nearly 6.5 million pregnancies in 2009, 35.5 percent of African American pregnancies were terminated, along with 17.1 percent of Hispanic pregnancies.
When considered in relation to other causes of death by race and ethnicity, abortion is by far the leading cause of mortality for Hispanics, accounting for 64 percent of deaths, as well as for blacks, among whom abortion is responsible for 61.1 percent of deaths—meaning close to two out of every three deaths in both communities are attributable to abortion.
The authors also calculate the years of potential life lost before age 75 (YPPL 75) due to abortion. Of the 17.7 million YPLLs lost by Hispanics, nearly 15.5 million (or 87.4 percent) were due to abortion, and of the 29.4 million YPLLs lost by blacks, 25.4 million (or 86.5 percent) were from abortion.
The paper concludes by arguing that the exclusion of abortion from mortality statistics “may be the ultimate case of science denial,” and urges healthcare researchers to begin including it in their data sets.
[RELATED: Pro-life message silenced at UNC]
”The appropriate role of science is to inform this societal dialogue with objective information. Labeling abortion as a preventable death is not an argument for restricting access to a legal abortion,” the authors concede. “However, refusing to acknowledge abortion as a death undermines the role of science and the value of transparency so fundamental to a free society.”
“Abortion as a death is an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth for pro-abortion advocates,” Studnicki told Campus Reform, noting that listing abortion as a cause of death would “force a reordering of national healthcare priorities. Climate change, for example, looks rather trivial as a threat to increased mortality compared to abortion based on hard science.”
Studnicki also pointed out that “the science/academic/public health communities overwhelmingly support legal abortion,” asserting that “the academic community has greeted this research with profound silence” because “any debate about the paper would give it a higher visibility—and this is something that the majority of academic/science/public health ‘thought leaders’ want to avoid at all costs.”
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