Sooner or later, babies will be too precious to abort
By: Michael Cook, originally published January 31, 2025, Mercator
In November last year French TV channel CNews was fined €100,000 (US$103,000) for stating that abortion is the leading cause of death worldwide.
The fine was imposed by the French media regulatory body Arcom after a CNews journalist made a reprehensible assertion on in February 2024 on its program “En quête d’esprit” (“In Search of Spirit”). In a discussion amongst several women about the psychological consequences of abortion, presenter Aymeric Pourbaix said that abortion was killing babies. All hell broke loose amongst the bien-pensants of the Twitterverse.
Well, that’s not exactly what Pourbaix said. He simply displayed an infographic based on Worldometer, which had drawn its figures from World Health Organization statistics. These showed that abortions account for 73 million deaths globally each year, compared to 10 million from cancer, and 6.2 million from smoking.
The infographic appeared for about 15 seconds. But they were 15 seconds of hellish torment for the bien-pensants. The response to the program was visceral – “nauseating and deeply offensive”, “simply unacceptable”, CNews should be nuked, and so on. It was denounced in the National Assembly.
According to Arcom’s ruling, CNews failed in its “obligation of honesty and rigour in the presentation and processing of information.” Abortion could not be described as a cause of death, since that would imply that abortion was murder. To assert that a foetus was a person is “manifestly inaccurate”. CNews was peddling misinformation.
CNews is a Catholic channel owned by Catholic billionaire Vincent Bolloré. It was forced to issue a grovelling apology.
But who is the real misinformation villain? Jean-Marie Le Méné, president of the pro-life group, Fondation Jérôme Lejeune, described Arcom’s ruling as Orwellian nonsense:
“Indeed, equating an aborted child to a death would make abortion murder. To make it possible to practice it with a clear conscience, it is therefore forbidden to say that abortion takes a life. Otherwise the keystone of the system collapses. Abortion must remain harmless. But who believes in this fiction?”
Further, wrote Le Méné, the decision amounts to censorship: “Transforming a verified fact into a disputed opinion, susceptible to repression, leads to a consequence: omertá.”
Well, so that Mercator won’t be fined in France, let’s describe abortion as the “cessation of a potential human life”. That’s OK, isn’t it? How else can you describe it?
The best available statistics from the World Health Organization show that abortion is far and away the biggest cessator of human life, whether or not it is legal.
The latest year for which data is reasonably complete is 2021. That year there were about 68 million deaths in the world, according to WHO. The leading causes of mortality were:
- Heart disease (9 million)
- COVID-19 (8.7 million)
- Stroke (6.9 million)
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (3.5 million)
- Lower respiratory infections (2.4 million)
- Trachea, bronchus, lung cancers (1.8 million)
- Alzheimer’s and other dementias (1.8 million)
- Diabetes mellitus (1.6 million)
- Kidney diseases (1.4 million)
- Tuberculosis (1.3 million)
Also in that year there were about 73 million induced abortions worldwide according to the WHO.
So not only is abortion the leading cessator of human life globally, it accounts for more than all other cessators of human life combined – about 52 percent of all cessations of human life every year.
Is this just a debating point? A moment for pro-lifers to gasp with horror? No, it’s the reason why abortion will eventually be banned everywhere in the world.
Look at it this way. Around the world, most countries in the West and East Asia are being depopulated. Sooner or later, people will compare the decline in population to the number of abortions and conclude that this makes no sense at all. In a world where every baby is a wanted baby, abortion will be taboo. It will be stark, raving mad. Babies alway have been precious, but when the penny drops, they will be more precious than ever.
Take Japan, as an example. In 2021 141,000 abortions were reported. In the same year, the population fell by 644,000.The Japanese government is desperate to raise the birthrate – lest Japan and Japanese be swept away by the winds of history. It is trying all sorts of schemes, from subsidized IVF to baby bonuses to increased maternal and paternal leave. Sooner or later people will ask themselves: why not discourage abortion?
Russia, where the population is falling off a cliff, is already restricting them. It hasn’t banned abortion – but it is discouraging it through government-funded campaigns.
Its media is full of pro-natal advertising. One ad features a young couple who receive a knock on the door one night from a cute little toddler, who tells them, “I am your happiness.” The woman lets her in despite her boyfriend objecting that “we are not planning for it.” She replies, “You can’t plan happiness, can you?”
In a few years’ time, mark my words, the media in France will be running similar campaigns.
Michael Cook is editor of Mercator