PIP: The national security implications of abortion have not been addressed in a public forum but could come to be the single most important facet of the abortion debate. Abortion has been and will continue to be an essential variable in fertility control. Any serious effort at population growth control in the next few decades will have to recognize the role abortion has in birth rate decline. At this time an estimated 40-50 million abortions are performed worldwide each year; 1/2 of them are illegal. In the absence of abortion, annual growth would approach approximately 120 million. Growth of this magnitude would probably place intolerable strains on the economics and environments of some nations. To recognize the role of abortion in fertility control is to emphasize the inescapable need for abortion as 1 element in any comprehensive family planning service. Excessive population growth leads to chronic unemployment and the frustration of the goals of hundreds of millions of people. While this new threat to the security of individual nations and ultimately to global security has not been widely acknowledged, it is beginning to gain the attention of people of different professions and distinctive political persuasions. In many ways, rampant population growth is an even more dangerous and subtle threat to the world than thermonuclear war, for it is intrinsically less subject to rational safeguards and less amenable to organized control. Possibly the greatest and most pervasive problem is the declining ability to meet human needs in the areas of food, raw material, and resources, counterpoised against what are clearly rising expectations of growing populations. The following facts cannot be disputed: world population is a threat to the security of all nations, including the U.S.; abortion is essential to any effective population growth control effort; abortion is a national security issue; and as the availability of legal abortion in the U.S. goes, so goes the availability of abortion in the developing world.