On January 18, Martin Luther King Day, pro-life demonstrators prayed silently for five hours around the perimeter of Houston’s newest Planned Parenthood abortion facility, which, when it opens for business later this year, will be the largest abortion facility in the Western World. Only China, with its mandatory “one-child-per-family” policy, has larger and more effectual abortion facilities.
The six-story former bank building (described by some pro-life groups as a “cash register”-shaped structure) is located about two miles southeast of Houston’s downtown skyscrapers, near two large universities, and in the midst of several neighborhoods which are either predominantly Hispanic or predominantly black.
Matt Lockett, executive director of Bound4Life, explained that an estimated 1,200 pro-life demonstrators surrounded the building and silently prayed, while another 10,000 pro-life demonstrators marched through sections of the nearby minority neighborhoods and voiced their opposition to the opening of this new abortion facility. According to Lockett, “God is going to raise up prominent minority voices in America to say that abortion is bad, not just for the babies, obviously, but abortion is bad for women.”
Since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, more than 50,000,000 abortions have been executed in this country. This estimated number, originally calculated by Heritage House in 2007, starts from statistics generated by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI, which is Planned Parenthood’s Research Affiliate) and adds on AGI’s 3 percent estimate of the number of unreported abortions as a percentage of the total number of reported abortions each year.
After the 1973 Roe decision, the yearly rate of abortion rapidly climbed above the 1,000,000 mark by 1975, stabilized above 1,600,000 per year during the 1980s, and then declined somewhat to recent yearly rates above 1,200,000 per year. Over the 37 years since 1973, the average yearly rate of abortions has been about 1,350,000 per year. That’s roughly 26,000 per week. If abortions were executed at a constant pace throughout a six-day, 48-hour work week (they aren’t, but we’re just calculating averages here), the above weekly rate of 26,000 abortions is roughly equivalent to 540 per hour, 9 per minute … or about one abortion every seven seconds.
That rate will almost surely increase. Why? Although supporters of the legal right to abortion (who would prefer to talk about “reproductive rights” in order to conflate abortion with the right to reproduce) claim that they want abortions to be “safe, legal, and rare,” in recent years, Planned Parenthood, the largest U.S. abortion provider, has been significantly increasing its capacity by opening very large abortion facilities at several new locations throughout the nation. Indeed, the business of providing abortions must be a highly profitable, “growth” industry (see “A New Pro-life Documentary: ‘Blood Money'”). Furthermore, if abortion coverage becomes part of the pending federal healthcare bill and the bill passes . . . the yearly rate of abortions can only go up.
While Planned Parenthood’s innocuous-sounding name seems to suggest wholesome thoughts about the loving care of parents for their children, the stark reality is that Planned Parenthood’s primary income-generating service is abortion, which involves killing the parents’ offspring.
How did we allow our nation to slip into this nightmare and generate these mind-boggling statistics? How did we lose over 50,000,000 citizens during these last 37 years? How many more citizens will be lost to abortion before we finally stop our destructive national choice with regard to abortion? Why did we, as a nation, permit a court-created right to abortion to supersede the God-given right to life — which is the very first right that our government was instituted to secure?
Reacting to the undeniably corrupting evil of slavery, Thomas Jefferson once said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” As we contemplate more than 50,000,000 abortions in the last 37 years, we too should be trembling, and for the same reason.
Photo: New Planned Parenthood facility in Houston
