Abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide in 2024, according to new data published by Worldometer, which shows there were 45.1 million abortions globally last year.
This surpassed deaths caused by cancer (8.2 million), smoking (5 million), HIV/AIDS (1.7 million), traffic fatalities (1.35 million) and suicide (1.1 million), Breitbart noted, adding that the combined total of all non-abortion deaths was estimated at 62.5 million, so the procedures accounted for just over 42% of all human deaths in 2024.
Worldometer compiles ongoing tallies of major global statistics. It tracks population growth, births, deaths, automobile production, book publications and CO2 emissions, among other data. Citing numbers released by the World Health Organization, it also registers the number of documented abortions performed worldwide each year.
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In the United States, abortion accounts for roughly one-third of all annual deaths. The figure among African Americans reportedly exceeds 60% of total deaths in that community, the news outlet pointed out.
A 2016 study from the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine showed the disparity of black deaths through abortion. The Rev. Clenard Childress Jr., a pastor who described the phenomenon as a form of “black genocide,” has said, “52 percent of all African American pregnancies end in abortion,” Breitbart added. Childress also said abortion “is the most common operation performed on women,” yet “the least regulated medical procedure.”
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that black women have the highest abortion rate of any demographic, at 24.4 abortions per 1,000 women in the latest year for which there is data, while white women have the lowest rate, at 5.7 per 1,000. This translated to black babies being more than four times as likely to be aborted as white babies.
Worldwide, there’s a “critical shortage of babies,” said LifeSiteNews, citing coverage from The Guardian, Globe and Mail, Euronews and Politico.
LifeSiteNews compared abortion’s toll of 45.1 million unborn children in 2024 to Canada’s entire population of about 40.1 million, remarking that every year, the equivalent of an entire country is “killed by abortion.”
It added that many news outlets reporting on the decrease in global births fail to connect these trends with the tens of millions of abortions recorded annually. Some nations have suppressed or penalized media outlets that present abortion as a cause of death, it explained.
In France, ARCOM, the French media regulator, fined CNews €100,000 ($103,000) after presenter Aymeric Pourbaix stated last February that abortion ranks as the leading cause of death worldwide under estimates from the World Health Organization, which places the figure at 73 million procedures per year.
In ARCOM’s view, the network had failed in its “obligation of honesty and rigor in the presentation and processing of information” by suggesting that “abortion cannot be presented as a cause of death,” the publication noted.
