WASHINGTON — The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has released its annual “abortion surveillance” report, showing that abortion rates are continuing to fall in the United States, but still more than 623,000 babies were murdered in 2016.

“A total of 623,471 abortions for 2016 were reported to CDC from 48 reporting areas,” the organization wrote, outlining the latest year on record. “Among the 48 areas that reported data every year during 2007–2016, decreases in the total number, rate, and ratio of reported abortions resulted in historic lows for the period of analysis for all three measures of abortion.”

The figure is down two percent from 2015, when 638,169 abortions were reported, and equates to 186 abortions for every 1,000 births.

The actual number of abortions could be much higher, however, as California did not submit data for the annual study, and “[a]bortions in California represent 15.4% of all abortions in the United States,” according to the Guttmacher Institute. It reports that 132,680 abortions were performed in California alone in 2017.

As in previous years, the CDC report outlined that “women in their 20’s accounted for the majority of abortions and had the highest abortion rates,” with a total of 319, 638 abortions. The vast majority of women obtaining abortions — 86.8% — were unmarried, compared to 13.2 percent of married women. The figures equate to “380 abortions per 1,000 live births for unmarried women,” the CDC notes.

While adolescent abortions continued to fall, down to 46,980 from 49,596 the year prior, college age students 18-19 were by far the largest age bracket of teens containing abortions. Nearly 32,000 of the nation’s abortions from the reporting states were freshman and sophomore age students.

The number of abortions in 2016 varied widely from state to state but with only a slight decrease from the year prior, with 87,202 abortions in New York, 53,481 abortions in Texas, 33,811 abortions in Georgia and 32,568 abortions in Illinois. There were 4,562 abortions in Missouri, 2,956 abortions in Utah, 1,131 abortions in Vermont, and 664 abortions in South Dakota.

More than half — 56.9% — of the mothers who ended the lives of their unborn babies in 2016 obtained an abortion for the first time, while 43.1% had previously ended the lives or of one or two children. According to the report, 37,061 mothers had previously obtained three or more abortions.

91% of the children killed were under 13 weeks gestation and 59.9% died by surgical abortion. Surgical abortion for this gestational period includes the methods of aspiration curettage, suction curettage and manual vacuum aspiration, which involve using suction to rip the baby from the womb.

Out of the 623,471 abortions in 2016 that were tallied by the CDC (not including figures from three states), as previously reported, 332,757 or 53.3% were performed by Planned Parenthood, which despite its claims, is considered the largest abortion provider in the nation.

Read the CDC Abortion Surveillance report in full here.

As previously reported, in early America, Christians were staunchly against abortion, seeing the shedding of innocent blood (Proverbs 6:16-17) and the discontinuance of a life created and given by God as murder.

In his 1869 sermon entitled “Ante-Natal Infanticide,” E. Frank Howe, the pastor of the Congregational Church of Terre Haute, Indiana, said, “[I]t makes no matter that the victim cannot stretch out its hands in defense. … It matters not that it … can utter no cry of pain or reproach. The sacred gift of human life is taken — is deliberately taken, and this constitutes the crime, and that crime is murder.”

He lamented that “men and women place their own ease and pleasure above God’s law” and that “public opinion is so corrupted there is no voice of reproach,” forthrightly declaring, “Put what face upon it the community will, disguise it under whatever name you please, you can make no more or less of it than simple murder.”

Ecclesiastes 11:5 states, “As thou knowest not what is the way of the Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.”

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