Abortion has topped several infectious diseases as the world’s leading cause of death for at least the fifth year in a row, even though multiple abortion restrictions have gone into place at the state level following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Statistics compiled by Worldometer, a database that tracks quantitative data on health, the global population and other metrics in real-time, show that more than 44.6 million abortions were performed worldwide in 2023. The number of abortions performed last year exceeds the combined number of casualties caused by the other leading causes of death listed.
The second leading cause of death worldwide, communicable diseases, took the lives of over 12.9 million people last year. Cancer was attributed to more than 8.2 million deaths, while smoking contributed to the deaths of over 4.9 million people.
More than 2.4 million people died of alcohol use, more than 1.6 million people perished because of HIV or AIDS and over 1.3 million people lost their lives in road traffic accident fatalities. Over 1 million people died by suicide.
The number of abortions performed in 2023 remained relatively unchanged from 2022, even though last year constituted the first full year since the U.S. Supreme Court determined in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t contain a right to abortion. The Dobbs decision led to the passage of laws in several states that either severely restricted or almost entirely banned the procedure.
The pro-life activist organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America estimates that the pro-life laws passed in the year and a half following the Dobbs decision, including those that are currently on hold due to legal challenges, will prevent 166,239 abortions each year.