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?’”