Abortion has always been framed as a matter of personal choice, legal debate, or political compromise. But the sheer scale of human life lost to this practice is now impossible to ignore. According to recent reports, abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide in 2025, claiming an estimated 73 million lives. To put that in perspective, that is roughly the population of France — vanished in a single year.
For conservatives who reflect on the original intentions behind the abortion debate in the 1970s, these numbers are staggering. Back then, Roe v. Wade and its contemporaries were conceived not in the language of mass-scale elimination but as a narrow solution for difficult, exceptional circumstances. The expectation was never that tens of millions of human lives would be terminated annually. The moral compromise of that era was meant to be limited, restrained, carefully circumscribed — a tragic but contained concession, not a global epidemic.
Now, half a century later, the consequences are devastating. The post-1973 world has normalised abortion on a scale the original architects of the law could scarcely imagine. What was once presented as a rare, sorrowful option has become, in statistical terms, the single greatest cause of death on the planet. Each number represents a life, a human potential never realized, a family never formed, and a society robbed of its future citizens.
This is not merely a statistic; it is a moral crisis. Societies that tolerate, or even celebrate, such losses are complicit in the systematic eradication of the youngest, most vulnerable among us. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the people behind the initial legal compromises did not envision this reality. The conservative warning of the 1970s — that life begins at conception and that the law should err on the side of preservation — was drowned out by the political expediency of feminism.
Today, as we confront the enormity of abortion's toll, conservatives and all people of conscience must reflect: we are witnessing the consequences of a moral miscalculation whose scale has far exceeded our worst fears. Reclaiming a culture that respects life at every stage is no longer a political nicety; it is an urgent moral imperative.