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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Content: 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. However, the most recent figure on abortions from WHO we could locate dated from 2014 and was slightly higher than Worldometers’ tally. WHO estimated that between 2010 and 2014, an average of 56 million induced abortions occurred worldwide each year. If WHO’s estimate of 56 million abortions annually held steady through 2016, when they released their survey on the top ten leading causes of death globally, it would be true that the number of abortions worldwide outnumbered overall deaths from heart disease and stroke, the top two causes of death that year. In 2016, ischemic heart disease and stroke killed a total of 15.2 million people worldwide, according to WHO, noting that “These diseases have remained the leading causes of death globally in the last 15 years”: We can infer from WHO statistics that the difference between the number of abortions worldwide versus the number of deaths from heart disease and stroke worldwide is not a new dynamic, although viral stories proclaiming that abortions “now” outnumber deaths from those other causes imply that fact is a recent development.