Title: Was Abortion the 'Leading Cause of Death' in 2018? | Snopes.com
Headings: Was Abortion the ‘Leading Cause of Death’ in 2018?
Was Abortion the ‘Leading Cause of Death’ in 2018?
Leading causes of death worldwide and abortion estimates -- two different measures?
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Was Abortion the ‘Leading Cause of Death’ in 2018? Was Abortion the ‘Leading Cause of Death’ in 2018? Leading causes of death worldwide and abortion estimates -- two different measures? Bethania Palma
Published 3 January 2019
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On 31 December 2018, the Breitbart.com website reported under the headline “Abortion Leading Cause of Death in 2018 with 41 Million Killed” that “there have been some 41.9 million abortions performed in the course of the year,” making abortion “the number one cause of death worldwide in 2018, with more than 41 million children killed before birth.” That article spawned a ripple of similar reports on various other sites, most of which referred back to the Breitbart piece, which itself rested on a figure gleaned from Worldometers, a real-time tool that “analyzes the available data, performs statistical analysis, and builds our algorithm [to feed our] real time estimates.” Worldometers states that its abortion figures refer to induced abortions (as opposed to miscarriages), and that: The data on abortions displayed on the Worldometers’ counter is based on the latest statistics on worldwide abortions published by the World Health Organization (WHO). According to WHO, every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day.