Worldmeter collects statistics from various resources, including the World Health Organisation (WHO), and displays estimated counts in real-time, including global deaths.
While the website reported total deaths to be over 60.6 million, this figure did not include the 44.6 million abortions that took place in 2023, which were shown separately.
Once again, abortion was the leading cause of death last year, far outnumbering the next seven causes combined, which included cancer, smoking, alcohol and HIV/AIDS.
The abortion death toll in 2023 also outstripped total military deaths in both world wars combined.
There was likely a record number of abortions in the UK last year, as in 2022 when deaths surged to unprecedented levels. There were 123,219 abortions in England and Wales between January and June 2022 (data for the second half of the year has yet to be released) while there were 16,584 abortions in Scotland over the whole year.
Medical abortion (abortion pills) accounted for most unborn deaths in the UK.
SPUC Comment
A SPUC spokesperson said: “While deaths from war and other forms of violence, as well as disease, are rightly lamented in the media, the millions of unborn lives lost to abortion are reduced to a mere footnote, if they gain any mention at all, and it is as if they didn’t matter or never really existed at all.
“But these lives did matter, of course, and they still do. Each life, every boy and girl who had their existence snatched away from them mattered – because life is valuable, and every child has an inherent right to life, which we must strive to protect.
“These dreadful statistics should not be allowed to remain as numbers on a sheet. They should spur us all on to rededicate our lives to creating a world where abortion is unthinkable.”
