It’s almost impossible to track all the preborn babies lost to abortion throughout the world, but the Global Life Campaign tries to make sure that no lives fall through the tracks. Through the Sacred Accounting Tables, Thomas Jacobson and his team try to make sure that every preborn life lost to abortion is recognized.

This process started in 2001 when Jacobson was working for Focus on the Family in its United Nations division. He realized that one of the primary areas of contention in the international community was abortion.

“Every international conference and United Nations meeting I was going to representing Focus on the Family, abortion became the number one battleground. Okay, I thought, how big is this problem,” Jacobson said in an interview with The Daily Citizen. “We know our numbers pretty closely in the United States, but what about other nations? So, I began to develop a database of nations in 2002, by 2009 I had developed a pretty comprehensive record.”

Focus on the Family shut down its United Nations division in 2010, so Jacobson was entrusted with the global abortion numbers. In 2011, Jacobson set up the Global Life Campaign, an organization dedicated to supporting pro-life governments around the world. Jacobson thought that with the data he had, supplemented with information from scientist and passionate pro-life advocate Dr. Robert Johnson, should result in some sort of global report. 

So, in 2016 Jacobson and Dr. Johnson set about to get their global data report of abortions in a print format that they hoped would be adopted into college campuses, churches and libraries throughout the country.

Called “Abortion Worldwide Report: One Century, 100 Nations and One Billion Babies,” the book contains a little more than 300 pages of data about abortion across the world since 1921. Though the book covers a lot of material, the Sacred Accounting Tables are perhaps the most important part. 

“The Sacred Accounting Tables go year by year with all the abortions that we could track from 1921 through 2015 in the book, and we have updates through 2019 available now on the website,” Jacobson said.

Tracking these numbers is not something that Jacobson or Dr. Johnston take lightly.

“Over the years of gathering all this data, it was really sobering, gut-wrenching and tear-provoking at times because these numbers weren’t car parts, these were numbers of babies,” Jacobson said. “I titled the tables the Sacred Accounting Tables because it was a sacred duty to account for and remember these babies. So, every time I found a change of numbers, even if it was just one, I updated it because that baby’s life counted.” 

The hope is that through this book, people around the world can use it to help defend life and continue to maintain pro-life legislation. 

“We need to value life so much, that governments will be willing to change their laws and protect innocent human life,” he said. 

It’s a hopeful prospect. Though abortion and infanticide have always existed in some form or another throughout history and across nations, access to abortion has become more readily available in our modern world. But if people come together and are willing to support life, then governments and world leaders will have to take notice.

 

Follow Brittany on Twitter @brittanyraymer.