America’s Silent Killer: 48.5 Million Americans Lost

It may sound like a scenario from a super-secret nuclear contingency plan, but a silent killer has eliminated a population equal to that of America's 60 largest cities. Forty-eight and a half million Americans have vanished without a trace! According to Dennis Howard, who heads The Movement for a Better America, "that's not some imaginary nuclear contingency plan. It is in fact the cumulative impact of nearly 34 years of abortion on demand.”

According to a regular annual review by The Movement for a Better America, a non-profit, pro-life education organization headquartered here, "Forty-eight and a half million Americans have vanished without a trace."

"This is not some imaginary nuclear contingency plan. It is in fact the cumulative impact of nearly 34 years of abortion on demand,” says Dennis Howard, a former investigative reporter and market researcher who heads the organization and who has been tracking the nation's abortion statistic since 1992.

"What's amazing," Howard says, "is that the vast majority of Americans hardly seem to notice."

His organization doesn’t make these numbers up. They are all based on data collected by the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood. “We simply take the most recent data and project it through the current period. Otherwise, there is always a 2-3 year lag in the estimates.”

Howard asserts, "The fact is that nothing has inflicted more permanent damage on our society than abortion. 48.5 million abortions is 43 times more than all the fatalities from all the wars in our nation’s history, including the ravages of the war on terrorism and the tragedy of September 11. Yet these numbers never seem to make the headlines.”

Howard, who began his career as an investigative reporter and later directed market research projects for major corporations, blames the media for their self-imposed censorship on the abortion issue. “A handful of casualties in Iraq will make the evening news, but the abortion industry will kill more people in two days than we have lost since 9/11, and that never gets a mention.”

”Imagine if we had lost 6,850,000 people in the so-called war on terror,” he said. “That’s how many children we have lost to abortion since 9/11."

Howard's analysis has uncovered a number of reasons for public apathy about the abortion toll:

“Politics can’t change things because of the extreme polarization between the two major parties,” he said. “That started when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade by edict, instead of allowing normal democratic processes to deal with the issue.

“Roe v. Wade effectively split the country in three – left, right, and confused middle. So now we have politics by media sound bite and bumper sticker cliches instead of healthy, honest political dialogue.”

“In some ways, we’re like the ‘good Germans’ during World War II who never seemed to realize that there was a brutal holocaust going on,” Howard said.

Howard blames public apathy on the fact that the abortion industry operates behind a veil of protected secrecy. “Unlike the Germans, we don’t have industrial-scale concentration camps operating two miles out of town. Only 1 in 15,000 American women have an abortion on any given day, so no one notices. But if you multiply that by 365 days a year for 34 years, the total becomes astronomical.”

Howard has been tracking the economic impact of the abortion toll since 1992, when the count first reached 30.5 million. Since then, an estimated 18 million more babies have been aborted.

“The economic loss may be the least of our problems,” he said. “Abortion has also desensitized the culture to sex abuse, violence, and predation against children. Just look at what we see on television every night."

Nevertheless, Howard’s market research background led him to conclude that the trend had the economic impact of a major nuclear war.

“The human loss from abortion is the same as if all of our major metropolitan centers had been lost to a nuclear attack,” said Howard. “The only difference is that a nuclear war would be a dramatic, cataclysmic event, while abortions take place one at a time in the sanitized privacy of a medical clinic.”

“The long range impact on America's human resources is no different,” he said. “We measure the economic impact of other things like this all the time -- from alcoholism and drug addiction to AIDS and cancer. But the economic impact of losing a baby is far greater than when someone dies after a long life.”

A list of the top 60 cities with a population equivalent to the loss from abortion can be found on MBA's website: www.movementforabetteramerica.org

A few of the more obvious repercussions include:

Social Security: If half of the 48.5 million kids we aborted were working today, they would be contributing an additional $88 billion a year into the Social Security trust fund.

Taxes: The downstream loss in future tax revenues from abortion currently exceeds $18 trillion dollars. “Someone else will have to pay those taxes.”

The end of the Youth Market. “The 30% bite that abortion took out of the youth market is a major reason for the drop in daily newspaper circulation as well as increased competition for young audiences by other media. By supporting abortion on demand, the liberal media are killing off their own future audiences. Pro-choice politicians are doing the same thing. That’s why they have such a hard time winning.”

Labor shortages: There is a looming shortage of labor in critical fields such as nursing, teaching and even the armed forces. “We’re raiding countries like the Philippines for nurses today, and using citizenship as an incentive for immigrants to fill the ranks of the military. Where will that leave us in a major military crisis?”

Immigration: “The labor vacuum created by abortion is also related to the immigration crisis,” Howard claims. “Ross Perot had it wrong: The giant sucking sound was really the sound of illegal immigrants crossing the border from the south, not just jobs heading the other way. Right now, apples and peaches are rotting on the ground in Oregon and Washington because there aren’t enough workers to pick them.”

“As the Pete Seeger song says,” Howard concludes, “‘When will they ever learn?’”

I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.

deep thoughts by Jack Handy

Granmie Fix

Quote of the year


"I don't drink decaf unless it is absolutely necessary for social decorum. Decaf is evil. I am not exaggerating. Coffee by its nature has caffeine. To decaffeinate is to remove an essential good, albeit an accidental good, from the coffee. Therefore, decaf is evil because of the lack of good that ought to be present. Now where is my grinder?"

- Ragemonkey's Fr. Tharp

Just had to share this

Thank God some doctors still follow the Hippocratic oath

Dateline NBC

Open-fetal operation saves infant's life
An eleventh-hour attempt to save the tiniest of lives


Saving Garrett
May 13: Jan and Russell Morrison were hoping for a baby boy -– but the prognosis for the baby in Jan’s womb was grim. The baby had a huge tumor filling the left side of his chest. With a team of gifted doctors, they set out to beat the odds.





NBC News
Updated: 2:56 p.m. PT May 13, 2007


BONHAM, TEXAS - High school sweethearts Russell and Jan Morrison shared the same dreams and were happily on their way to living them in Bonham, Texas.

Russell Morrison: Two kids and my wife and just… you know, a perfect little family.

Baby daughter Carson was the start of that perfect little family. And in September 2005, Jan learned she was pregnant again.
Story continues below ↓advertisement

Rob Stafford, Dateline correspondent: Are you hoping for a boy?

Russell Morrison: I’m hoping for a boy but I’m happy either way.

But having their perfect family would take this couple on a medical odyssey far beyond anything they could have imagined. The odds were against them, the risks potentially fatal, the medical science turned mind-boggling. Still Jan and Russell, together with a team of gifted doctors, set out to beat the odds.

It began in January 2006, five months into Jan’s pregnancy. She had a sonogram to learn the sex of their baby. It was a boy.

Stafford: Just what you want.

Russell Morrison: Just what I wanted.

Jan Morrison: I was excited but it was a very short-lived excitement.

It was short-lived because Jan was noticing this ultra sound was taking longer than others she’d had.

Jan Morrison: The lady that did the ultrasound… she kept focusing on one particular image.

The little boy they were hoping for had a huge tumor filling the left side of his chest. It covered his heart and was pushing it to the other side. The prognosis was grim.

Jan Morrison: I was just mad. I was excited about being pregnant and didn’t wanna lose my child and wanted to do something about it and I couldn’t find an answer.

Russel began researching his son’s condition, and where it might be treated. In February 2006, two weeks after first learning about the tumor, the Morrisons traveled to Houston to consult with specialists at Texas Children’s Hospital. There the news was even worse.

Russell Morrison: We met with the cardiologist that morning and she told us that he was basically in heart failure.

The tumor appeared to have grown. It was 3 inches large, filling the chest of a 5 month old fetus which weighed a mere pound and a half. It was now squashing the heart, lungs, and diaphragm. Blood wasn’t getting to the heart, which was rapidly failing.

Stafford: How much time does he have?

Russell Morrison: They told us he had about a day and a half to live when we got there.

Jan and Russell decided all that was left to do was plan the inevitable. At lunchtime they began making funeral arrangements.

Jan Morrison: That was the only thing I could do so couldn’t help my child so I did what I could.

And they gave their son a name: Garrett.

Jan Morrison: It was my baby and he needed a name. And just was wanting to name him while he was still alive.

Russell Morrison: We needed something to put on his headstone.

With funeral arrangements underway, and seemingly out of hope, the Morrisons still had an afternoon meeting with more doctors. Among them, fetal surgeons Darell Cass and Oluyinka Olutoye. Who said something the Morrison’s did not expect.

Stafford: Can you remove this tumor?

Dr. Darrell Cass: Yes, we can.

Stafford: This is doable?

Dr. Darrell Cass: It is doable.

Doable, but these doctors would have to operate where few have ever tried—inside a mother’s womb.

Dr. Darrell Cass: It’s high-stakes surgery. It’s the only thing we do where you have to go through a normal patient to get to a fetus—another patient that’s dying.

It was risky for both mother and child. Jan faced the possibility of never having children again or worse: bleeding to death during surgery. And there was no guarantee her son would survive. Still, without the operation she would definitely lose her baby.

Stafford: Is there any question in your mind whether you’re gonna go ahead with the surgery?

Jan Morrison: No. It was Garrett’s only shot, and I wanted to go with it.

Stafford: How quickly do you need to operate?

Dr. Darrell Cass: Within hours. The child had only limited time to survive.

On Feb. 7, 2006, 21 hours after arriving at Children’s hospital for consultations, doctors prepped Jan for surgery.

Surgeons will open the womb, remove the tumor from a tiny 5 month old fetus, then close the womb so the pregnancy can continue... all this without triggering labor.

An ultrasound showed the doctors the baby’s position.

And it guided them in determining where to open Jan’s uterus.

A half hour into the procedure, the uterus was safely opened, and Dr. Cass saw Garrett for the first time.

Dr. Darrell Cass: It’s always a fairly dramatic moment to see this very, very young fetus, this developing human that’s dying.

Garrett’s tiny chest had to be opened to remove the tumor. To expose the chest, Dr. Olutoye had to raise Garrett’s left arm out of his mother’s womb. Right in the operating room, the doctor found himself actually holding the hand of this 5 month old fetus, which weighed less than two pounds.

Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye: Well, consider the size of my hand—being able to hold that tiny hand was actually quite dramatic.

Garrett now straddled two worlds. Part of him was delivered, and part of him still inside his mother’s womb. The doctors then opened his chest and found the tumor that was rapidly killing him.

Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye: I don’t think either of us really anticipated how big it really was gonna be up close and personal.

The tumor was so large, it filled about two thirds of Garrett’s chest cavity.

Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye: It was unbelievable that that size mass came out from such a small child.

Stafford: Now they faced one of the trickiest parts of the procedure: putting Garrett back in his mother’s womb and closing it up as well.

Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye: The last thing we want is for incision to pop loose and the baby come out of the uterus ruptured.

After two and a half hours in surgery, Dr. Cass gave Russell the news he’d hoped for.

Dr. Darrell Cass: Everything went fine for your wife.

Dr. Darrell Cass: He was doing as good as he can possibly be, but we were not out of the woods yet.

Garrett’s survival remained uncertain. His heart could still stop, Jan could go into labor and deliver Garrett too early to survive. These next weeks were critical and Jan had to remain in the hospital, in bed.

By the end of March, they were on the home stretch with just over six weeks to go. And Garrett’s chances of survival were getting better by the day.

Jan Morrison: The doctors are saying that Garrett looks like a normal 29 week old baby. And that his lungs have developed. And they’re looking normal and healthy.

But it was a temporary calm. Ten o' clock at night, Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006, Jan was bleeding and she was going into labor. If her labor continued, it could rupture her uterus.

Dr. Darrell Cass: There was absolutely no choice. Now was the time to deliver.

At 11:45 that night, Garrett was delivered, fighting for his life yet again.

Dr. Darrell Cass: Garrett comes out and he did look a little blue.

Russell Morrison: They they took him and hit the doors running.

Dr. Darrell Cass: I was worried. Did Garrett die somehow during this delivery process? But then, he began to move. And then, he began to cry. And so, it really became clear that he was doing great. It was an incredible relief. And a really a joyous, joyous moment.

The little fighter had made it two and a half months after miraculous surgery in his mother’s womb.

Stafford: You got your boy.

Russell Morrison: I got my boy. It was all coming together just like we hoped for.

Finally in May 2006, the Morrison’s perfect little family was home at last. Happy, and healthy. The only sign of what this baby endured was the scar on his chest.

Stafford: You look at him now and what do you think?

Jan Morrison: I think how perfect he looks. After all he’s been through, he looks so good. He’s just a miracle and God’s gift.

Here, at eight months old, Garrett’s heart and lungs are strong. His tumor was benign, no worry it will come back. Doctors expect him to have a completely normal life.

Russell Morrison: He’s had a pretty tough road, but he’s made it every step of the way. He’s a little fighter.

Garrett at one year old

"We forget that Christ adopted our human nature from the moment of conception. Christ did not incarnate into a non-human amorphous piece of tissue. It would have been beneath his dignity. He doesn't love tissue. Tissue is not made in God's image and likeness.

God became like us because he loved us; he became an unborn child because he loved the unborn child, like he loves Man at all the stages of his life. In fact, Christ has a special place in his heart for the unborn, as he does for all who are marginalized, weak, poor and vulnerable.

The liberal cannot fathom such a love for the unborn, because to him, he is not an equal. To him, the unborn child cannot live up to a man-made litmus test of "personhood". The child is a blob of tissue, a mere organism, a parasite. His worth is relative to his being able to demonstrate certain capabilities. He must have a heartbeat, or brainwaves, or feel pain, or have consciousness or self-awareness, or some other arbitrarily selected ability, in order to be deemed worthy.

But this is judging with human eyes. In God's mind, the human being's value is intrinsic and independent of any other consideration. From the moment a human being exists, God loves him. There is no performance test required. We may not be able to know who the unborn child is, but God does. God sees his virtues, talents, and future accomplishments. He is a somebody in light of his very existence."

from the Birth Story blog site

A glimmer of hope

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Friday in a speech at the University of Delaware said that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that effectively barred state abortion bans, is not a precedent he is willing to accept, the Wilmington News Journal reports. "When you give the court the power to insert new rights, you also give it the power to take out old rights," he said, adding, "The right to abortion on the part of a woman is the end of the right to live on the part of the fetus" (Miller, Wilmington News Journal, 4/28).

According to the AP/Washington Examiner, Scalia defended his "originalist" approach to interpreting the Constitution, saying that the document should not be subject to change based on the norms of society. He added that if U.S. citizens want to secure new constitutional rights, they should look to the legislative branch, not the Supreme Court. "The Constitution is not a living organism," Scalia said, adding, "It's a legal document." Several opponents and supporters of abortion rights staged silent demonstrations outside the theater where Scalia spoke, the AP/Examiner reports (Chase, AP/Washington Examiner, 4/27).

An Atheist Argues Against Abortion

David Hunt, PE

Yes, I am indeed an atheist. Raised as a Jew, I became an atheist in my late teens over two decades ago. I’m happy with it, and am stating it because of the perception that all atheists are pro-abortion. To my astonishment, however, I’m pro-life.

It started with a bumper sticker several years ago. That bumper sticker read, “If it’s not a child, you’re not pregnant.” The more I thought about it, the more I agreed with it in my gut. I started to do some thought experiments. The one that convinced me was this one:

A woman wakes up to another day of morning nausea. She buys a pregnancy test, and it comes up positive. From there, two scenarios unfold, admittedly at extreme ends of the spectrum. (N.B.: I do not discount that many women who seek abortions do so reluctantly, nor do I doubt that even the most enthusiastic mothers-to-be occasionally have twinges of doubt; I am using extremes for a reason.)

Scenario One: She is suffused with warmth, knowing that she is about to be a mother. Names flash through her mind. Visions of baby clothes, cribs, and everything else dance before her eyes as she starts making plans for one of – if not the – biggest events in her life.

Scenario Two: She curses, throwing the test into the trash. Upon leaving the bathroom, she reaches for the yellow pages for the phone number of an abortion clinic.

What’s different about these two women? They could be the same woman. Is one physically different from the other? No. Is the embryo inside her different? No. The sole difference is her perception of the nascent life inside her.

Therein lies the crux of the issue. In the first scenario, the growing clump of cells is a baby, less than a year away from entering the world squalling and welcomed. In the other, it’s a fetus, an unwanted clump of cells to be excised. The same physical entity perceived wildly differently.

Where else have we seen such a difference of the value of human life based solely on perception? Genocide. Throughout history groups have slain other groups, and the core of this appalling crime comes from the same source: The perception that some human life is, in fact, not human and may be exterminated. Just like a fetus is not human, and can be eliminated for convenience’s sake.

A human life is something of immeasurable worth. At times human life can ethically be ended, such as when defending your own in self-defense, or during war when engaging the enemy. But this presumes that the enemy, whether one-on-one against a rapist or on a battlefield with an enemy equally determined, is potentially capable to do the same to you. In contrast a fetus has no intent, no opportunity, no ability to intentionally injure. It is a total innocent, like the innocents herded from their homes, lined up beside trenches, and killed in countless tragedies throughout the world.

The dichotomy is stark. Aside from a few fringe nuts, every human being recoils in horror from genocides; the piles of Tutsi bodies in Africa or the ovens at Auschwitz. It’s almost impossible to comprehend such evil. We abhor this awful crime whose root cause is the dehumanization of a person. But pro-choicers celebrate the legal ability to destroy a fetus based on that same dehumanized perception.

Legal or not, abortions will still happen so long as people see abortion as just another method of birth control. After all, abortion is not the root problem – unwanted pregnancies are. Through encouragement of abstinence, through birth control training, through monogamy, through planning, and especially through adoption and financial assistance to encourage it, through all these multiple attacks on the real problem, we have the power to essentially eliminate the need for abortions as a method of birth control. Only when people perceive abortion as the snuffing out of a human life, not a method of convenience, will abortion end.

Abortion is based on the idea that a human life’s value is subject to perception; that it can be redefined to have none. By dehumanizing it in the tradition of every genocidal authority, by shifting our perception of life’s value, we slowly sacrifice our own humanity on the altar of convenience. Even without deity-derived rules from which to pull judgment, it’s a poor trade. And that’s why this atheist is pro-life.