By Judie Brown
An incomprehensible number like 73 million can be so challenging for people to wrap their heads around that many, if not most, choose to ignore it. But in this case, that number represents human beings who were brutally killed by acts of abortion. It is an unfathomable tragedy. We might choose to balance that number against the total population of the world today, perhaps making it more realistic for us.
The world meter website, which increases by the second, suggests that on January 9, 2026, the number of people in the world was more than eight billion. Yet another incomprehensible number. But what if we think in terms of God’s creation? We know that every person in the world is created by God in His image and likeness. We also know that there is no such thing as a disposable human being.
Man disposes of trash, not people. Or at least that is the way it should be. Yet in our day man has become carnivorous in his thirst for the blood of the innocent. Quite literally, the evil one has taken hold of the hearts of far too many of God’s children, and the result is gruesome to behold.
According to a LifeNews report,
When contrasting the abortion numbers to other causes of death, including cancer, HIV/AIDS, traffic accidents and suicide, abortions far outnumbered every other cause. By contrast, an estimated 10 million people died from cancer in 2025, 6.2 million from smoking, 17 million from disease, and 2 million died of HIV/AIDS. Deaths by malaria and alcohol are also recorded.
With 67.1 million people dying last year from a cause other than abortion and 140 million people dying in total from abortion and all causes, that means abortions accounted for almost 52% of all deaths around the world last year.
This is macabre. The number reflects a tragic level of moral insanity. Yet as this number continues to increase, the opportunities to teach the truth about who is being aborted appear to be waning. There is something wrong in our world today, and we know exactly what it is. But in case we have doubts, think about the writer who, in an article entitled “Civil Society in the U.S. Is a Dead Man Walking,” opined:
Possessive individual rights do not complement a notion of politics oriented toward the good of the person. Quite to the contrary, they are conceived as antithetical to such a notion of politics. Rights replace good as the purview of politics. Having rejected any notion of a shared political end of the human person, ours is a political society that posits and foments mutual antagonism of every man against every man, to paraphrase Hobbes.
It would seem that even state supreme courts are at the ready to deny human personhood in favor of an expectant mother’s alleged right to have her baby killed. Note the pro-abortion Wyoming Supreme Court ruling: “The State did not meet its burden of demonstrating the Abortion Laws further the compelling interest of protecting unborn life without unduly infringing upon the woman’s fundamental right to make her own health care decisions. As such, the Abortion Laws do not constitute reasonable and necessary restrictions on a pregnant woman’s right to make her own health care decisions.”
Imagine a trained jurist suggesting that imposing death on her own baby is a mere healthcare decision. If you can wrap your moral arms around those words, you are as lost as anyone who would posit that directly killing a person is acceptable if the law says it is. If that is not the epitome of a society becoming a dead man walking, I have no idea what is.
Saint Francis de Sales once said, “It is to those who have the most need of us that we ought to show our love more especially.” Indeed. We have 73 million reasons to persist in our efforts to protect preborn babies. We have a story to tell and a fetal development lesson to teach. And we must have the will to never stop doing either.