The Numbers We Refuse to See

The Numbers We Refuse to See

"Every man carries two deserts. One under the sun. One under his skull. The one outside only kills you once. The one inside kills you every day."

I sat at the kitchen table of our modest country home, the wood stove ticking in the corner as it cooled. My wife and daughter were asleep. The house was quiet in the way only rural nights can be.
And on the mantle above the stove sat the small wooden box that holds the remains of our stillborn daughter.
A weight that never leaves.
A reminder that every child is a universe.

Maybe that is why the numbers hit me harder than they should have.
Because I know what a single child is worth.
Because I have held death in my hands.
Because I know what it means to lose someone who never had a chance to speak.

So I sat there with the spreadsheets open, pencil notes in the margins, the hum of the stove the only sound in the room.

Global wars and political mass killings since 1861.
One hundred ninety million dead.
One million one hundred seventy-three thousand per year.

That number includes the Holocaust, the six million Jews who were targeted and slaughtered with industrial precision, along with millions of others the Nazis condemned.
We built museums to that horror.
We teach it in schools.
We vow “never again.”
We mark remembrance days across the world.
As we should.

Then I put another column beside it.
Not war.
Not genocide.
Not invasion or trench fire or gas chambers.

Just abortion. Just the U.S.

U.S. abortions since 1973.
Sixty-three million dead in fifty years.
A rate higher per year than the global war death rate since the U.S. Civil War.

Then I widened the lens.

Global deaths from abortion each year.
Over sixty million babies.
Per year.

And this is where the arithmetic turns sickening.

A single year of global abortion kills as many humans as global wars and genocides kill in sixty-two years.

One decade of global abortion kills more human beings than the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, Mao’s famine, the Rwandan genocide, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and every civil war on earth combined, from 1861 to now.

But there are no monuments.
No remembrance days.
No museums.
No national mourning.
No candlelight vigils.

No one stands on a stage and says, “Never again.”

Instead, we get slogans.
We get euphemisms.
We get policy debates.
We get moral fog.

We are a civilization that mourns the dead when it is politically convenient and shrugs at the dead when they are inconvenient.

The Holocaust is taught in every school in America, as it should be.
But try finding a single public school curriculum that teaches the number of abortions committed since 1973.
Try finding a memorial garden for the unborn in any major city.
Try finding a museum of the sixty million whose ashes are not collected in urns but in medical waste bins.

I have walked through the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
I have stood in silence before the shoes of murdered children.
I have read the letters of mothers and fathers who watched their families disappear.

And then I have walked into my own living room.
I have looked at the mantle.
I have seen the small wooden box containing what is left of my second daughter.
A child who never breathed air, yet whose absence tears at my chest every day.

Her death was a tragedy.
Her life mattered.
Her absence is a wound.

So when the world tells me that millions of other children are disposable, invisible, forgettable, irrelevant, that their deaths are not worth a whisper much less a memorial, the numbers take on a darker meaning.

They reveal something rotten in the soul of our time.
A selective compassion.
A blindness we choose.
A moral cowardice we dress in political language.

We build museums for the murdered children of past horrors, and we should.
But we build nothing for the murdered children of our own age.
We cannot look at them.
Not because they are not human, but because we know they are.

And if we admitted that, we would have to admit what we have done.
What we are doing.
What the numbers expose with brutal, unrelenting clarity.

Global abortion is the great unspoken slaughter of modern history.
The desert of the twentieth century was external, filled with camps and trenches.
The desert of the twenty-first is internal, hidden behind clinic walls and polite language.

But the dead do not care about euphemisms.
The arithmetic does not care about politics.
And the soul does not stay quiet forever.

The desert outside kills the body once.
The desert inside kills the conscience every day.
And there will come a time when the world is forced to look at what it tried so hard not to see.