By Dave Andrusko

Having read six separate posts about the release this week of the Guttmacher Institute’s report on the continuing reduction in the number of abortions, the reader might ask, why would NRL News Today feel the need to again revisit an analysis concluding that the number of abortions had dropped below one million, first in 2013 (958,200) and then lower still in 2014 (926,190), the first time since 1975?

I could list a dozen reasons. The day before the inauguration of pro-life President-elect Donald Trump, let me offer just four.

#1. Yesterday I was reading an article from a 1994 edition of Guttmacher’s Family Planning Perspectives (now called Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health) and a simple graph in the middle grabbed my eye.

It showed a huge spike in abortions in 1973 (when Roe v. Wade was handed down)–744,600. By 1975, the estimated number had leaped to 1,043, 200. Just four years later, the death toll had climbed to just under 1,500,000!

The numbers stayed roughly in that range until 1990 when the “zenith” of the abortion frenzy was reached: 1,608,600.

Contrast that with the steady, unrelenting decrease over a 24-year span, culminating in a number that was a whopping 673,800 fewer dead babies than in 1990.

My point? Unless you carefully trace the rise and fall of the slaughter of unborn children over this long period of time, it’s almost impossible to grasp the magnitude of how much you have accomplished.

This is not to minimize the challenge ahead. 926,190 abortions is 926,190 too many. But there are many, many reasons to believe the number of abortions will continue to dwindle.

#2. That same June 1994 Family Planning Perspectives article was already bemoaning the decrease in the number of abortion “providers.” The authors were keenly aware of (for them) the somber reality that fewer and fewer hospitals were “providing abortion services.”

Why is that important? The Abortion Industry and its legion of media apologists fully realize that most physicians look down on abortionists; killing unborn babies hardly qualifies as “real medicine.” It’s a boon for Planned Parenthood’s bottom line that almost all the killing is done in abortion clinics, but a bust for the image of “abortion providers.”

#3. What might be called the Inevitability Factor. Beginning with the January 24, 1973 New York Times editorial that followed the Roe decision by two days, apologists for abortion have worked 24/7 to depict opponents–us–as out-of-the-mainstream deplorables who can’t get it straight that the battle is over and the death peddlers have won. Or, as George Herman, the CBS Evening News correspondent who summarized the Roe and its companion decision Doe v. Bolton decision put it, “If the experience of New York State is any guide, America will eventually have one abortion for every two births.

Without you, one abortion for every two births!

You stood athwart the anti-lifer’s vision of the arc of history. And because of you the death trains never ran on schedule and there are far fewer passengers on them.

#4. But the Inevitability Factor cuts both ways. If, thanks to you, it proved false –the number of abortions did not inevitably go higher and higher– it is also true that without your continued grassroots work the diminution could plateau.

That is why we continue to talk about the Guttmacher report. Not because I expect you to rest on your laurels. That is impossible. Rather because I want (a) to help you appreciate how many people are walking the earth because of your work; and (b) to encourage you to remember that evil never, ever takes a holiday.

Proverbs 4: 16-17 puts it this way:

16 For they do not sleep unless they have done evil;

And their sleep is taken away unless they make someone fall.

17 For they eat the bread of wickedness,

And drink the wine of violence.

I offer my gratitude to all of you who have fiercely and relentlessly battled all those who kill unborn babies for a living and for all their compatriots who defend the indefensible.

Editor’s note. If you want to peruse stories all day long, go directly to nationalrighttolifenews.org and/or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/daveha. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.