"The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members."

—Mahatma Gandhi

I'm pretty sure that Ganhdi would agree with me here when I say that the most vulnerable members of our society are stray animals and preborn children, the former of which we are willing to allow to be murdered by the millions because they aren't human and we don't want them around, and the latter of which we are willing to allow to be murdered by the millions because we don't consider them to be human and we don't want them around.

I'm certainly no expert on any of these subjects, and I didn't exactly do any real research into them or anything (just a few hours or so of googling different statistics and stuff), but I had wanted to get an idea of just how many animals we kill in animal shelters here in the U.S., as well as the number of legal abortions performed here since Roe v. Wade, the number of deaths due to gun violence here, and the number of people executed here, in order to see just how bad each of these problems truly is.

Specifically, my goal was to answer the following 4 5 questions:

1. How many death row inmates are executed in this country compared to the number of stray animals who are killed in animal shelters here?

2. How many death row inmates are executed in this country compared to the number of preborn children who are killed in abortion clinics here?

3. How many people are killed by gun violence in this country compared to the number of preborn children who are killed in abortion clinics here?

4. What sort of impact have abortions, gun violence, and the execution of criminals had on the size of our population?

5. Do all lives matter?

Again, I didn't do any in-depth research for this blog, so if any of my numbers are off or something, please let me know in the comments.

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1. Animal Shelters Vs. Death Row

On average, approximately 920,000 animals (390,000 dogs and 530,000 cats) are killed in animal shelters every year in the U.S., and 56% of dogs and 71% of cats that wind up in shelters are killed there.
(And if that sounds bad, consider that millions of animals used to be killed in shelters every year back in the 70s.)

In 2019, 625,000 animals were killed in shelters in the U.S., significantly lower than in years past, and going based off of this relatively low number, it means that 1,712 animals are killed in shelters every day, or 1 animal killed every 50 seconds.

I'm not going to get into why the numbers are much lower than they used to be, or why there are still hundreds of thousands of animals being killed in so-called "animal shelters" every year, but I will simply state that stray animals do not "humanely euthanize" themselves, and that while the kind people who adopt animals from shelters are true heroes, as are all of the people who work at no-kill shelters, I can't say the same of all of those shelters that are willing to kill the animals that they claim to be trying to help, as their inhumane actions are the very cause of this hidden genocide of millions of homeless dogs and cats.
(Can you imagine if homeless shelters for us humans killed people the way that animal shelters kill homeless animals?)

Now, far more controversial than animal shelters killing millions of stray animals for some reason is the death penalty for convicted criminals, but without getting into whether or not it is ever morally justifiable to execute another human being (even a mass murderer), how many criminals do we actually put to death in this country every year?

Well, regardless of how many inmates are currently sitting around on death row waiting to die (which is apparently about 2,450), we have only executed 1,543 people in this country since 1973, and in 2019, we only executed 22 people.

If you do the math, this means that we have executed an average of 32 people every year since 1973, or about 1 person executed every 11 days.

32 criminals executed every year is approximately 0.005% of the 625,000 animals that we killed in animal shelters in 2019, which means that for every 1 death row inmate that we execute for crimes such as murder, we execute over 19,531 innocent dogs and cats for the apparently unforgivable crime of being homeless and unloved.

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2. Abortion Clinics Vs. Death Row

Abortion is an extremely divisive political issue, primarily driven by the fact that pro-life people like myself see preborn children as fellow human beings that deserve to not be killed, while pro-choice people oftentimes see them as nothing more than a "part of a woman's body", or a "cluster of cells", which makes the killing of them merely "women’s healthcare" in the minds of pro-choice people, rather than infanticide.

As can be seen on this factsheet I found on the NRLC's (National Right to Life Council) website, anywhere between 47,135,983 (according to the CDC) and 59,936,193 (according to the Guttmacher Institute) preborn children have been killed in abortion clinics in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade became the law in 1973, and the NRLC themselves estimates the total number to be closer to 63,459,781, based on their own adjusted version of the Guttmacher Institute's numbers:

Based on numbers reported by the Guttmacher Institute 1973-2017, with 3% added for GI estimated possible 3-5% undercount for 1973-2014.

Another 12,000 per year added for 2015-2021 for abortions from “providers” GI says it may have missed in 2015-2017 counts.

Going based on these numbers, anywhere between 961,958 (based on the CDC's numbers) and 1,295,097 (based on the NRLC's estimate) preborn children have been killed every year since Roe v. Wade began, or between 2,635 and 3,548 killed every day since Roe v. Wade, or 1 preborn child killed somewhere between every 24.35 to 32.78 seconds.

Thankfully, much like the kill rates in animal shelters, the abortion rates have gone down considerably since the 70s, but even going based on the CDC's numbers for 2017 (which is the lowest yearly abortion number that I could find anywhere), over 600,000 preborn children are still killed every year, which amounts 1,678 killed every day, or 1 preborn child killed every 51.47 seconds.

Since this is commonly brought up by pro-choice people, it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of these abortions (>99%) are NOT the so-called "late term abortions" that dishonest pro-life people tend to use to scaremonger people into agreeing with them, but it is my personal belief that life begins at conception, and that any killing of a human embryo (or whatever the scientifically accepted term is) is the same as killing a human baby, regardless of whether or not they "look human" yet, or have a heartbeat, consciousness, the ability to feel pain, etc.
(None of that stuff really matters to me personally, only that they will eventually develop into a human baby, but that they won't if you kill them first.)

As I mentioned in the previous segment, we have only executed 1,543 people in this country since 1973 (the same year that Roe became law), which means that for every criminal we have executed since 1973, we have aborted between 30,548 and 41,127 preborn children.

If we go based on those CDC abortion numbers for 2017 however, then we only abort about 19,147 preborn children for each criminal that we execute here every year, although this is obviously still a rather disturbing statistic.

In order to rationalize allowing 1 human child to be killed every 51 seconds, we have to dehumanize them, to not acknowledge that they are the human children that they would eventually otherwise become.

It seems that while our current system acknowledges the humanity of convicted murderers and rapists who are given death sentences (which is why there are so many who still haven't been executed yet), it has no such soft spot for the most innocent and helpless among us, be they homeless dogs and cats, or even our own unwanted children.

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3. Gun Violence Vs. Abortion

In the wake of yet another mass shooting, where 19 innocent children and 2 teachers were senselessly murdered, many Democratic lawmakers are pushing for some form of gun control legislation, with some even suggesting that we should get rid of the 2nd Amendment entirely.

This is all happening while Republican-controlled States all over the country have been passing anti-abortion laws, emboldened by the possibility that the current 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court might finally repeal Roe v. Wade.

Both pro-life Republicans and anti-gun Democrats are motivated by the same desire to save human lives (especially the lives of children), but just how many lives would ending all gun violence in the U.S. actually save compared to ending all abortions?

Well, almost 1,500,000 people have been killed by gun violence since 1968, which averages out to approximately 28,302 people killed by guns every year, or about 78 gun deaths every single day.

Of course, unlike killings at animal shelters and abortion clinics, gun violence deaths are on the rise, and in 2020, 45,222 people were killed by guns, 4,357 of which were children.

This means that around 124 people (12 of which were children) were killed by guns every day in the U.S., or 1 person killed by a gun every 11 and a half minutes.

Of course, these are just gun deaths, and upwards of 117,345 people are shot by guns every year, amounting to 1 person being shot every 4 and a half minutes.

These are some pretty disturbing numbers to be sure, but even the number of people being shot by guns every year (rather than the number of those being killed by them) is only about 19% of the 612,719 abortions performed here in 2017 (according to the CDC's numbers), so in terms of how many lives would be saved by eliminating abortions compared to eliminating gun violence, it is obvious that stopping all abortions would save far more lives than stopping all gun violence would.

Of course, one crucial difference between victims of gun violence and victims of abortion is that while people all over the nation will mourn the loss of 21 lives lost due to a senseless act of violence, there are far fewer people who will mourn the equally senseless deaths of over a thousand preborn children in abortion clinics every single day, and there are many who would not even acknowledge that those being killed in abortion clinics are even people.

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4. Overall Impact on Population Size

As of 2021, the current population of the U.S. is approximately 332,915,073.

The number of legal abortions performed here in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade became the law in 1973 is somewhere between 47,135,983 and 63,459,781, which are about 14% and 19% of the current U.S. population, respectively.

By comparison, the number of people killed by guns in the U.S. since 1968 is approximately 1,500,000, which is about 0.45% of the current U.S. population.

Lastly, the number of people executed in the U.S. since 1973 is 1,543, which is about 0.00046% of the current U.S. population.

In other words, somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 8 Americans have been aborted, about 1 in 223 Americans have been killed by guns, and about 1 in 215,759 Americans have been executed.

Looking at these numbers, it is quite apparent that the only one of these things that has had a truly devastating impact on the size of our population is abortion, despite the fact that those 1,500,000 gun violence deaths since 1968 exceed the combined death toll of 1,200,000 American soldiers who have died in all of our nation's wars throughout history.
(Of course, there were certainly millions more people than that dying in all of those wars, just not our soldiers.)

Unfortunately, it remains somewhat unclear what impact outlawing abortions would have on the number of preborn children killed every minute or so here, as there will inevitably be some number of pregnant people who (for whatever reason) decide to illegally kill their preborn children anyway, which in turn could also result in some of these potential parents also dying, due to having unsafe "back alley abortions", "DIY abortions", etc.
(It seems highly unlikely that the combined number of parent and child deaths due to illegal abortions could even come close to the number of lives that would be saved by the inevitable reduction in the total number of abortions overall, however.)

The same thing applies to any sort of gun control measures as well, as even if the 2nd Amendment itself were actually repealed, and all firearms were outlawed here, many people would still obtain them illegally (something that a would-be murderer would likely have no problem whatsoever with doing), which means that gun violence with illegally acquired firearms will continue to occur regardless.
(And then there's the issue of confiscating all of the guns that everyone already has...)

Of course, the sad reality is that while all lives do matter, our laws don't currently reflect this, which is why while those 1,500,000 gun violence victims were all killed illegally, the killings of those tens of millions of preborn children and stray animals were all perfectly legal under our current laws.
(Maybe only human lives matter, IDK...)

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5. Do All Lives Matter?

When I first wrote this blog back in 2022, it was just a few weeks after my mother had passed away on May 2nd, and just a few weeks before the Supreme Court's historic Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

I had actually wanted to write about these topics for a long time, but despite not being shy about sharing my political views here on Paint, I still felt somewhat uncomfortable writing about them in a blog here, but I was incredibly depressed at the time, and I essentially went “what the hell have I got to lose at this point?”, and decided to go for it.
(When you're feeling suicidal, small risks like that don't really matter much to you.)

I was obviously thinking a lot about life and death at the time, and particularly, whether or not life actually mattered. Did my mother's life really matter to anybody besides me? Did my life matter to anybody else now that my mother was gone? And does anybody's life really matter since we're all just going to die eventually anyway?
(I was in a pretty dark place.)

Although I put “political” in this blog's title—because it technically is—for me personally abortion has never really been a “political” issue per se, nor do I really think of it as a cultural, religious, or even necessarily a moral issue, but more of an existential one.

Why are some people—like myself and my sister—not aborted when others are? Do the lives of those who are allowed to be born somehow matter more than those who aren't?

The reason why I feel how I do about abortion revolves around this question, as well as what (almost) happened with my little sister. When my mom was pregnant with her, the doctor in charge of my mom's pregnancy tried to convince her to abort my sister, claiming that there were some “genetic abnormalities” or some nonsense, and that she wouldn't even necessarily be able to survive if she were born.

My sister is 28 years old now, and she is 1 of the 3 human beings (my dad and my late mother being the other 2) that I ever got to spend a meaningful amount of time with IRL, and I can only imagine the loneliness and misery I would've felt here had she not been here to keep me company.
(1 friend is a lot better than no friends.)

For me, separating the issue of abortion from what almost happened to my sister 28 years ago is impossible, as saying that it is OK for someone to abort somebody else is almost like saying—as my dad actually does say to this day—that it would've been OK to have aborted my little sister, and for obvious reasons I can never bring myself to say that.
(And what makes any other preborn person that could potentially not be aborted any different than her?)

Almost 20 years ago, my mom wrote a paper (for some college course she was taking at the time) about one particularly sad year where (in her own words) she lost 3 people that she had cared about dearly: her dad, her mother-in-law, and a child that she was trying to have that had miscarried.

She wrote about what each of these people's lives—and deaths—meant to her, and about the differences and similarities between her feelings of love and loss towards each of them, and never for a moment did she suggest that her preborn child's death meant anything less to her than the death of her father or her mother-in-law. In fact, the loss of her preborn child actually seemed to be the one that hurt her the most.
(And it hurt me quite a bit at the time as well.)

But what about that question of mine, “do all lives matter?” What exactly is the answer to it, as there is so much death in this world that we don't even think about, such as the deaths of single-celled organisms that we seldom ever even think of as being “alive”?

The question inevitably devolves into the more accurate question of “which lives matter and which lives don't?” An inherently problematic question to be sure, and one that vegans, pro-lifers, and pacifists all have views on that are generally quite different than those of the societies in which they live.

Since I wrote this blog, I have become familiar with both the concept of the Consistent Life Ethic and the Vegans for Preborn Rights organization, and I now openly support both. I myself am not yet a vegan—which is something that I say with a certain degree of shame BTW—but promoting veganism is an inherently good thing in my mind, because if I can convince a single other person to become vegan, it will inevitably save the lives of many animals.

The idea that only human lives matter—as I suggest might be the case at the end of this blog—is an inherently flawed one due to how many of us care about the lives of animals, but few people can accept the idea that the life of a mosquito a parasitic tapeworm or an amoeba matter, but the one thing that is always worth remembering—that I myself am more guilty of forgetting than most—is that your life matters, even if it doesn't feel like it sometimes.

Whether or not our lives matter isn't determined by whether or not they matter to others, but at the same time, our lives still matter even if they do not matter to ourselves. Unfortunately, there is no good answer to the question that I ask in the title of this blog, but it is still one of the most important questions that we can possibly ask ourselves nonetheless.