Tim Tebow’s baseball career may have hit a wall this year due to suffering a broken bone in his hand, but he is still one of the most intriguing public figures in modern American life. He is not giving up, though. He never gives up on what is most important to him.
Tebow has endured more abuse for his openly Christian faith than most of us will ever suffer. I distinctly remember how gracefully he weathered the disdain and outrage from the leftist media when he won the Heisman Trophy in 2007. His ‘don’t give up’ attitude may be something he gets from his parents.
Apparently, Tebow has been the target of threats and hatred from the beginning. His parents were missionaries in the Philippines when his mother, Pam, was pregnant with little Timmy. She was pressured to abort him after she contracted an amoebic infection. The doctors all but ordered her to have an abortion.
She refused. Seven months later she gave birth to a perfectly healthy boy. Little did the Tebows know that some twenty years down the road they would be standing on a national stage with a Heisman Trophy winner.
Few of us see such dramatic results for obeying God’s moral law, but there are always blessings of fidelity when we affirm His plan of life, marriage, and family.
The human cost of abortion
Tim Tebow’s story set me to wondering how many potential Heisman winners abortion has killed since the heinous industry started culling the population of “unwanted” babies back in the late 60s. It is a dark but interesting question.
For that matter, we can ask how many other human talent reserves (such as families, professions, institutions) have been debilitated or even wiped out by the human annihilation machine we casually refer to nowadays as “choice”. Despite the rhetoric, abortion is not an abstract concept. It is the destruction of a real human being.
And in case you were wondering, there is a specific answer to the question of how many potential Heisman Trophy winners we have lost to abortion. The answer is 10. I got that number from Brian Clowes, PhD, researcher for Human Life International, who examined census data from the Statistical Abstract of the United States (most recent data available from the 2010 census). Among other things, this massive database breaks down the workforce into categories of jobs that Americans do.
Dr. Clowes compared the overall abortion total (52.7 million deaths at that time, but, of course, much higher in 2019) to the breakdowns of Americans working in the various professions. From this, he drew statistical conclusions about what percent of those professions have been wiped out by abortion. It was easy to convert those percentages back into absolute numbers based on the overall 2010 population of 310 million souls, which we will show below.
The dictatorship of “choice”
Before that, let us point out a truly horrifying statistic: abortion has wiped out 14.5 percent of the American population.
Media outlets and left-wing activists are fond of comparing their ideological foes to murderous dictators (Hitler being the dictator of choice because they erroneously think he was a right-wing fanatic). There is a great irony here. The Cambodian psychopath, Pol Pot, wiped out 15 percent of his nation’s population (more than 1 million Cambodians) in the 1970s. Although the comparison is obvious, the media and cultural elites will never admit that abortion bears the distinct marks of an American genocide. But what is it, if not that?
There are many who see it that way, and I have no doubt that God blesses the heroic works of the humble people fighting for life on the front lines of culture and politics. Yet, as the nation faces up to the truth of this genocide, there is a predictable backlash from those who do not want it to change.
Recently, fading celebrity Alyssa Milano, who spent most of her career playing witches, launched a “sex strike” campaign to punish men for the tightening of abortion laws in certain states. Hollywood power brokers and celebrities are also attempting to penalize Georgia for that sovereign state’s audacity to restrict the killing of babies within their borders. As in all tyrannies, those in power will not tolerate any challenges to the status quo that keeps them in power.
Numbers don’t lie
But the numbers do not lie. Those who still have functioning consciences understand that the massive number of children deprived of the chance to live in the last 45 years has had a net devastating effect on American society. Close to sixty million are not here to play as babies, go to school and grow up, or to work as adults. They are just gone.
So, who have we lost to abortion? Let’s look at the numbers from Dr. Clowes:
- 2 US Presidents
- 7 Supreme Court Justices
- 92 US Senators and 532 US Congressmen
- 7340 federal, district and local court judges
- 28 Nobel Prize laureates
- 328 Olympic medalists, including 133 Gold medalists
- 132,753 physicians and surgeons
- 412,348 registered nurses
- 62,019 clergy of all faiths
- 1,049,969 teachers (K-12)
- 210,604 computer programmers and software engineers
- 206,537 social workers and counselors
- 457,664 truck drivers
- 207,408 maids and housekeepers
- 18,301 pilots and flight engineers
- 291,214 waiters and waitresses
- 103,703 police officers and sheriff’s deputies
- 41,249 firefighters
- 183,588 carpenters and construction workers, and
- 26,000,000+ females (the gender of roughly half of all children aborted).
These numbers are likely only a portion of the actual human toll of legalized abortion. We get our statistics about abortion from the abortion industry itself, so we can presume that the numbers are under-reported for the simple reason that abortion is a cash industry, which generally depresses numbers for tax evasion purposes. And, of course, these numbers only account for surgical abortions without taking into account the vast numbers lost by chemical abortions and the effects of chemical contraception.
The cultural effect
The statistics should also make it clear that one of America’s most tangible social deficits right now is a dearth of workers. In absolute numbers, abortion has killed off such a large segment of our working class that it has left a gaping hole in our workforce. Do you ever wonder why immigration is such a contentious issue for our nation today? Hint: a 50+ million person vacuum acts like a vortex pulling in 50+ million living people from other countries to do the work that so many missing Americans are not here to do.
We must also reckon the cultural toll of abortion. The cumulative effect of millions of short-term selfish decisions eventually wreaks a devastating effect on a nation’s future, but that is not always easy to see as disasters usually have many causes. However, an analysis of one of those hard case abortion scenarios may make the “cultural loss” discussion more concrete. This one, like the Tebow story, is based on an actual historical case:
If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 children already, 3 of whom were deaf, 2 of whom were blind, and 1 mentally retarded – and the woman herself had syphilis – would you recommend that she have an abortion?
Hopefully no one reading this article would recommend that the woman kill her baby. But we all know those who would. And in doing so they would have killed the child who grew up to be Ludwig von Beethoven.
The spiritual reality
Pro-lifers are not being dramatic when they claim that abortion causes incalculable damage to the human community. Let me state it clearly: even one abortion causes harm to society because a precious life is lost and, through it, we invite an ancient and heinous evil – child sacrifice – into our collective home while the majority of the family looks the other way.
As I have noted elsewhere, we must never forget that abortion is fundamentally a spiritual evil. There is always a reckoning when an evil this enormous goes unresolved in a nation for so long. American society is steeped in at least two of those biblical sins that “cry out to heaven” for justice, particularly the shedding of innocent blood and sodomy.
God does not turn a blind eye to these sins. Yet, He is patient and merciful toward our country because of the many Americans who refuse to accept these evils. He blesses those heroic fighters who attempt, whether ultimately successful or not, to restore order to a culture gone mad.
We can only address a spiritual evil with spiritual solutions. The affirmation of God’s plan for life, marriage, and family; the adamant refusal to accept the evil of abortion under any circumstance ; the offering of our prayers and sacrifices to God for the purification of great evil in our midst – these will sustain us and our families in the long battle of restoring a culture of life in America.
And every now and then God will throw in a Heisman Trophy winner to remind us that the battle is not in vain.
NOTE: Dr. Clowes told me he would be happy to send his full analysis to anyone who wishes to contact him at bclowes@hli.org.
This article was originally published on Catholic Stand.
