Gun violence deaths vs abortion rate
Executive summary
Comparing gun-violence deaths to abortion counts requires care: recent, high-quality reporting places U.S. firearm deaths in the tens of thousands annually (including suicides and homicides), while the sources here do not provide a single, authoritative contemporary figure for total abortions each year—some secondary outlets have cited figures in the hundreds of thousands to nearly a million, but those claims are not corroborated across the reporting provided [1] [2] [3] [4]. Any direct comparison must therefore separate types of mortality (violent death, suicide, procedure-related death) and acknowledge gaps in the abortion data available in these sources.
1. Gun deaths: scale, trends and what counts as a “gun death”
Recent nonprofit compilations and reporting place shooting deaths in the U.S. at levels ranging from roughly 14,651 for 2025 (a year-on-year decline reported by The Trace’s year-end compilation) to CDC-proximate totals in the tens of thousands when suicides and other firearm fatalities are included (The Trace; The Global Statistics) — for example, provisional CDC-based reporting cited by secondary sources has put firearm deaths near 46,728 for 2023, and nonprofit trackers document long-running high burdens of firearm mortality [1] [2] [5]. These tallies mix homicides, suicides, accidental shootings and legally justified killings; many analyses emphasize that firearm suicide accounts for the majority of gun deaths and that including or excluding suicides materially changes the headline number [2] [6].
2. Abortion counts and mortality: low procedural mortality, unclear total counts in these sources
Among the sources provided, authoritative recent annual totals for abortions in the U.S. are not consistently reported; an older local editorial claimed “an average of 920,000 medical and surgical abortions” in a year, but that piece is not a primary national data source and lacks corroboration here [3]. What is better supported in these sources is that deaths directly due to legal induced abortion are very rare: one compilation cites five reported fatalities from induced-abortion complications in 2021 and a cumulative 536 deaths from 1973–2021 attributed to legal abortion complications in CDC-based reporting summarized by a secondary site [4]. That gap — many hundreds of thousands of procedures annually versus very few procedure-related deaths — is the core statistical contrast suggested by the available reporting.
3. Apples and oranges: why the comparison can mislead
Comparing “gun deaths” with “abortion rate” conflates different phenomena: firearm fatalities are mostly sudden deaths from violence or suicide, counted as mortality events; abortions are medical procedures whose frequency is recorded separately from mortality statistics, and whose direct mortality is now extremely low in the U.S. [2] [4]. Political and advocacy narratives sometimes frame the two together to make broader points about public safety or moral priorities — for example, advocacy groups have linked messaging on guns and abortion to highlight overlapping policy debates about safety and health (Everytown; Planned Parenthood) — but that rhetorical linkage does not change the technical differences in what is being counted or the causes of death behind the numbers [7] [8].
4. Intersectional dynamics and real-world consequences
Recent academic and clinical reporting indicates an important intersection: restricted access to abortion appears to correlate with higher rates of intimate-partner homicide of pregnant and recently pregnant people, particularly by firearms, suggesting that abortion policy can indirectly affect gun-related deaths among a vulnerable population [9]. Advocacy groups further argue that communities most affected by gun violence often overlap with those facing reproductive-health inequities, and they point to structural causes and shared political actors as drivers of both crises [8] [7]. These linkages complicate any simple numeric comparison and call for policy attention to overlapping harms.
5. Conclusion and limits of available reporting
Available sources reliably document that firearm deaths constitute a major, ongoing public-health burden measured in tens of thousands annually and that deaths directly attributable to abortion procedures are rare; however, a precise, apples-to-apples numerical comparison of “gun violence deaths vs abortion rate” cannot be completed from the materials provided because authoritative, recent national annual abortion counts are not consistently presented here and many gun-death tallies depend on whether suicides are included [1] [2] [4]. The most constructive takeaway is to treat these as distinct but sometimes intersecting public-health issues: firearms drive a high volume of preventable deaths, while reproductive-care access influences other forms of lethal violence, including intimate-partner homicide [6] [9].