The Geometry of Abortion

According to Christian Life Resources, there have been about 55,000,000 abortions since 1973 (the number is a little less than that, but don’t worry: we’re making grim progress towards that “goal.”) I wondered if there wasn’t some way to represent this number, so I did a little digging.

Now, as far as abortion goes, we need to make a few assumptions. Most abortions are first-trimester, and in the first trimester the useless little clumps of cells are not very large. So one aborted third-trimester baby might be the equivalent of 256 12-week babies. To get an estimate of the average size of an aborted baby, we guess that the average is 12 weeks.

The Baby Center tells us the following about our 12-week-old “lebensunwertes Leben:”

“The most dramatic development this week: reflexes. Your baby’s fingers will soon begin to open and close, his toes will curl, his eye muscles will clench, and his mouth will make sucking movements… Meanwhile, nerve cells are multiplying rapidly, and in your baby’s brain, synapses are forming furiously. His face looks unquestionably human: His eyes have moved from the sides to the front of his head, and his ears are right where they should be.”

But enough of this sentimental pretending that a hyperannuated zygote resembles a human. Let’s get some figures we can use: From crown to rump, your baby-to-be is just over 2 inches long (about the size of a lime) and weighs half an ounce. Ah, that’s better.

Now, a lemon is about 12.31 cubic inches. Limes are smaller, so let’s figure about 10 cubic inches. So, since 1973, the US has had to discard about 550,000,000 cubic inches of “non-human” tissue (if it were human, killing it would be illegal.) At 46656 cubic inches to the cubic yard, that makes about 11788 cubic yards of dead baby. Since a 6-foot Dumpster holds 6 cubic yards, you’d have a train of them about two miles long to hold all that useless tissue.

Of course, our metric friends can also help out with measuring. It turns out that a cubic meter is 1.31 cubic yards, so 11788 cubic yards is about 9000 cubic meters.

Perhaps the greatest abortion performed on the art world is the hideous pyramid thrust into the center of the courtyard of the Louvre Museum. It completely disrupts and destroys the grandeur of the much-better buildings that surround it, an example of what happens when you turn a formerly faithful, royalist country over to gluttonous socialists like Francois Mitterand: You get what Prince Charles, in another context, called a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.”

The volume of the Louvre Pyramid is about 8411 Cubic Meters. The fortunate thing about dead babies, of course, is that they compress pretty well, and so this tiny mountain of abortions would pretty well fit into the pyramid, with enough left over to fill those two little side pyramids you see above that do not fit as a part of the calculation, and maybe some sloshed at the bottom of the upside-down pyramid (now isn’t there an image for what abortion does to social-welfare schemes like Social Security?) nearby that was featured in that bad movie with Tom Hanks.

We have, of course, ignored a weighty matter. At a half-ounce average each, there were over 1.7 million pounds of protoplasm to discard over time. Sounds like a lot, but that’s about 1/50th the weight of a battleship. The closest item I could find that weighed about 900 tons was this:

No, not the Arecibo Radio Telescope itself; the focusing aperture above it weighs 900 tons. I wonder what signals the Universe is sending? Will those 900 tons help us pick up anything?