by Steven Ertelt | LifeNews.com | 3/6/15 10:56 AM

When one considers the number of abortions in any given country, the tally of human life lost to abortion is staggering

In the United States alone, 57 million unborn children have died from abortions since Roe v. Wade ushered in an era of unlimited abortions in 1973. If you factor in the number of legal abortions in the several states that legalized abortion prior to the Supreme Court;s infamous decision, that horrific total is even higher.

But what of the number of babies who have lost their lives to abortion around the world int he decades abortion has been legal in countries across the globe? The number is incomprehensible and its impact is felt in other ways apart from the genocide of an entire generation.

From Human Life International:

At a conference in Rome on Thursday, Joseph Meaney, the Director of International Coordination at Human Life International, argued that abortion not only attacks the weakest of the weak, it actually harms the economy.

Speaking with Vatican Radio ahead of the event, Meaney explained that over the past fifty years, more than two billion babies had been aborted. “So we’re talking about almost a third of the human population which has been eliminated in the last 50 years,” he said, “And that has impacts everywhere, and on all kinds of levels, and on one of those levels is the economics.”

Meaney was refuting an argument made popular in the best-selling economics book Freakonomics, which claimed that abortion in US had reduced crime rate by 50%; and offered social benefits of over 30 billion dollars annually from abortion. Meaney said, the authors “made a post hoc ergo propter hoc error — they said that just because something happened afterwards, it was caused by something that happened before… It’s a common fallacy.”

 

“Let’s be very clear,” he continued, “Abortion is never permissible. Even if there was an economic benefit to aborting children, we wouldn’t be allowed to do it. It’s immoral to kill an innocent. But it’s also important to refute negative arguments from people who think that they’re making sense. It’s important to refute those arguments so that people don’t have an additional reason to commit the sin of abortion.”