44,000,000 Pennies

Last Saturday, while doing the dishes, I found myself wondering what 44,000,000 pennies looked like. (No, I'm not quite sure what brought that on.) Forty-four million is the supposed number of legal abortions in the USA since Roe v. Wade was handed down from our robed masters. It occurred to me that if people collected 44,000,000 pennies, not only would I and anyone else who's ever wondered it know what 44 million pennies look like, but it would be a good fund-raiser for a pro-life group. (44,000,000 cents = $440,000)

Of course it took only another moment or two to realize that this is hugely impractical. Most groups could never raise that kind of money, and even if they could, they'd rather have nice paper currency than a huge bunch of heavy, unwieldy pennies.

But I still like the idea. I think it could work on a smaller scale. A small pro-life group trying to collect the number of legal abortions per day in the US in pennies would be doable. That's somewhere between $300 and $400, I think; that doesn't sound like an impossible amount to collect or to roll afterward. In between collecting and rolling for deposit, there could be a themed display--"each penny represents a baby aborted today" or something like that. I don't know, maybe people wouldn't like the idea, but it might be an attention-getting fundraiser; most people have spare pennies lying around.