For the second year in a row, abortions have been the leading cause of death worldwide, with more than three times as many people losing their lives to abortion than the second leading cause of death.
Worldometer, a database that keeps track of statistics on health, the global population and other metrics in real time, determines the number of abortions performed worldwide based on data obtained from the World Health Organization. The last available snapshot of the Worldometer, as it appeared on New Year’s Eve, captured by the internet archive tool The Wayback Machine, revealed that approximately 42.6 million abortions were performed worldwide in 2021.
By contrast, only 13 million people perished of communicable diseases, the second-leading cause of death last year. The other leading causes of death paled in comparison to abortion, with 8.2 million people dying of cancer worldwide, nearly 5 million deaths caused by smoking, approximately 2.5 million alcohol-related deaths, nearly 1.7 million people succumbing to HIV/AIDS, more than 1.3 million people dying in traffic accidents, and nearly 1.1 million suicides worldwide.
