On December 28, Holy Innocents’ Day, the Church remembers the children killed by Herod, victims of the fear of the birth of a king. Two thousand years later, violence against the innocents takes other forms, more aseptic, more technical, more invisible, but no less real. Today, millions of human lives are deliberately cut short before birth, whether by direct abortion, by pharmacological mechanisms that prevent the continuation of an incipient pregnancy, or by the silent elimination of human embryos created in a laboratory.
This text does not seek to polemicize, but to provide figures and place this drama not as just another part of an seamless tunic, but as the center of the contemporary anthropological debate.
Spain: more than a hundred thousand legal abortions per year
In 2024, according to official data from the Ministry of Health, 106,172 legal abortions were performed in Spain. This represents an average of more than 290 human lives cut short each day. The figure is neither exceptional nor circumstantial: for years, Spain has maintained around one hundred thousand abortions annually, with a growing trend.
Europe and the world: millions of abortions each year
If we broaden the view, the dimension becomes difficult to assimilate. Across Europe as a whole, demographic estimates place the number of abortions at around 3.3 million per year. Spain is not an anomaly, but part of a continental pattern of normalizing abortion as an ordinary solution.
On a global scale, the figure is even more staggering. The World Health Organization and various demographic institutes agree that around 73 million induced abortions occur each year in the world. This equates to more than 200,000 human lives cut short each day, year after year.
We are facing an unprecedented historical reality: no war, no totalitarian regime, no natural catastrophe has eliminated so many human lives in such a continuous and silent manner.
The morning-after pill: the least visible link
Alongside surgical or pharmacological abortion, there is a phenomenon that is much less debated but massively widespread: the use of the morning-after pill.
In Spain, hundreds of thousands of units are dispensed each year (usual estimates place the range at around 700,000–800,000), and it is a widely normalized drug, available over the counter and socially perceived as an “emergency contraceptive.”
From a medical point of view, the morning-after pill primarily acts by inhibiting or delaying ovulation. However, the scientific literature describes that, when ovulation has already occurred, it hinders or prevents the implantation of an already conceived embryo.
There is no closed figure or absolute consensus, but prudent estimates place that possible effect at an approximate range of 5% (depending on the cycle moment and the drug). Applied to very high consumption volumes, even a reduced percentage could translate into thousands of embryos that do not implant each year.
It is a statistically invisible loss, but morally relevant.
Assisted reproduction: human embryos without a destiny
The third major area of the drama is in vitro fertilization.
In Spain alone, more than 167,000 IVF cycles are performed each year (according to recent records). Each of these processes involves the creation of several human embryos, of which normally only one —occasionally two— is transferred to the uterus. The rest are frozen, discarded for technical reasons, or stored for years in an industrial freezer.
There is no consolidated official public figure indicating how many embryos are destroyed each year in Spain. But activity data and clinical practice allow for an unequivocal conclusion: tens of thousands of human embryos per year never get transferred, and a significant portion ends up being discarded, abandoned, or destroyed.
In Europe, more than one million assisted reproduction treatments are performed each year. In the world, several million. The inevitable consequence is the existence of hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of human embryos whose lives remain suspended or cut short.
The great wound of our time
Abortion, the pill, and embryonic elimination are not isolated or marginal phenomena. Nor are they simply another piece within other moral debates. Together, they constitute the great anthropological wound of our time.
Never before has humanity produced and eliminated so many human lives in their most vulnerable phase. Never before has it been so easy to deny the human condition of the other precisely when they most depend on our protection.
But Holy Innocents’ Day is not only a day of denunciation. It is also a day of hope. Hope that the truth, stated clearly and without stridency, will once again occupy the center of the debate. Hope that science and technology will serve life, and not the other way around. Hope that a culture that today discards its innocents can return to recognizing, welcoming, and defending them.
Because a civilization is not measured by its power or its progress, but by how it treats those who cannot defend themselves. And there, precisely there, the moral future of our time is at stake.