Over 3,500 Lives saved since 2010?

Abortion numbers are falling everywhere across the country, including Pennsylvania. What impact is our pro-life advertising in Allegheny County having on those numbers?

In previous calculations of how many lives have been saved since Vision for Life - Pittsburgh began advertising in 2011, I have used the actual Allegheny County numbers for the year before, instead of the projected ones if there had been no advertising (using the percentage reduction of the rest of the State.)

If I have lost you already, don’t give up.* The bottom line is, I estimate the total number of lives saved from 2011 to 2016 to be over 3,500!

Now, this is a general number, and hardly precise. And, “correlation is not causation.” Still, the gap between the two lines strongly suggests that advertising is making the difference, and reaching the abortion vulnerable.

Birth numbers in the rest of PA declined 2.6% from 2010 to 2016, but increased in Allegheny County by 2.6% (a difference of 5.2%).

Thank God that, through our efforts and those of the pregnancy medical centers, so many more women are choosing life for their babies!

Feel free to share this encouraging news!


* Here’s how I calculated the figures. We have actual, annual abortion numbers for all the counties, including Allegheny. What I needed were the projected numbers of abortions if Allegheny County’s reduction in abortions were the average of all the other counties’. So, for example, in 2012 there were 6,909 abortions, which was 11.6% fewer than 2011’s 7,820. The reduction in abortion numbers for all the other counties, however, was only 1.4%. If we used abortion numbers from the year before we advertised, 2010, as the baseline for all subsequent calculations, the expected number of abortions in 2012 in Allegheny County would have been 7,587 (1.4% fewer than the projected 2011 number, which was 7,697). So the difference between the projected 2012 figure of 7,587, and the actual number, 6,909, was 678. Here’s a chart showing the difference between actual and projected abortion numbers for the years 2011 to 2016.

​Now some of the differences between projected and actual numbers may be due to other factors peculiar to Allegheny County, and some of the difference may be normal statistical variance between any one county and the rest (though it would vary up as well as down over the years). Say we’re out by 500, or even 800, for some reason -- this still leaves us with a very high number.

Chris Humphrey
​Executive Director