The pro-life movement needs strengthen its stand on killing babies and also to expand into other areas that cause death due, like abortion, to immorality (often in the way of greed). Time to go pro-life stronger than ever and all the way.
First some quick stats.
There were a documented 930,160 abortions in the United States by 2020, an eightfold increase from 2017. Between 2017 and 2020, abortion incidence increased in all four regions of the country and in a majority of states. By 2023, it had topped a million.
Globally?
Around seventy-three million abortions per year. More than the population of the U.K.
That’s a lot of death, horrid—what the Pope recently stunned the world by calling “assassination.”
But it is not the only concern for those who defend human life.
Take our food, what Robert Kennedy Jr. rightly describes as a mega-disaster: We’re feeding our kids and ourselves foods colored yellow with a substance derived from coal and oil, as just one of hundreds of examples.
The toll of processed foods and high-fructose drinks is awesome in the true sense of the word—so “awesome” it is actually beyond our current abilities to calculate. (See Kennedy’s short video at the end of this article.)
Add to that fast food that in many cases isn’t food at all. (Did you know that the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich, which so many choose as a “healthy” option, has at least fifty-five chemicals in it, including the dye derived from oil, Yellow-5?)
A 2019 study published in a prestigious medical journal called The Lancet estimated that poor diets are responsible for eleven million deaths globally each year, which would make dietary factors a leading risk factor for mortality worldwide. Unhealthy diet contributes to approximately 678,000 deaths each year in the U.S. due to nutrition. Some eleven million deaths annually are linked to diet-related diseases like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, a study finds. Those figures don’t include contaminated diets.
This is probably the most imminent threat to health and life: what we are eating and drinking.
Then there’s–yes–pollution.
Forget dismissing everything “environmental.” This has nothing to do with liberal or conservative causes.
This has to do with human health and, once more, life.
Each of the last three Popes has spoken loudly and strongly about it.
A reasonable estimate is that about two hundred million Americans may have been exposed to what they call “PFAS” (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances), also known as “forever chemicals.”
These toxic substances persist in nearly everything we use—from the ground in which crops are grown and livestock pastured to household items such as nonstick pans.
Over four hundred environmental chemicals are measured in human samples, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Some are more dangerous than others.
On one Texas beef pasture, next to a refinery, an unknown chemical was found that doesn’t even have a name (let alone do we know what it might do). In Louisiana, there was a fantastic case of contamination in Baton Rouge. Name of the area? “Devil’s Swamp” (we interviewed a poor devout man whose wife died from a puff of smoke from an incinerator).
That’s an acute incident. Far more deadly is the tally of chronic exposure.
In 2024, an estimated 2,001,140 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States and 611,720 people will die from the disease (about 1,670 deaths per day). Think of how we would react if 1,670 died in a hurricane (“Helene” recently killed about sixty—too many, and tragic, but a stark contrast.).
Now, take that figure—six hundred thousand—and add it to the unknown millions affected by diet. Already, you have as many deaths as via abortion.
When humans exploit others humans for money, and cause their injury or death, is this not evil? Is this not something for pro-lifers to rail against? Is a corporate executive who forges ahead with dangerous products any better than an abortionist?
Somehow, we give that a pass (in a misconstrued notion of capitalism).
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution causes an estimated seven million premature deaths worldwide each year–just standard air pollution. Toxic effluents in the air, water, and ground cause untold more.
We are at the point where plastic has literally percaded our bodies and even our brains. So widespread is this often non-biodegradable set of compounds that a tenth of a percent of each of brain cells is now plastic.
Dangerous chemicals are now found from polar bears in the Arctic flesh in the ice of Antarctica to the greatest tested depths of our oceans (God Creation).
Time to tally this and to add it to the pro-life cause, along with in vitro fertilization (IVF, which causes embryonic deaths) and euthanasia.
[resources: Tower of Light]