You know Erma Bombeck, and how funny she can be. Millions read her syndicated newspaper column regularly. But sometimes she’s not funny.

One of her own favorite columns is reprinted from time to time, when she’s on vacation. Thus, last summer, her fans saw again her sober column titled “The Phantom Senior Classes.” It’s about teenagers who die in drunk-driving accidents. Erma imagines a Central High (“somewhere in the Midwest”) which “until this moment” had a senior class of about 200, but this year, she writes, there will be no senior class at Central—nor any such classes for the next 45 years, because during that time some 9,000 young drunk-driving victims won’t live to get their diplomas.

In a futuristic flashback, she adds that Central High closed its doors in 2029, because of “decreasing enrollment”—indeed, 44 more Centrals would also close down, because in those 40-some years over 400,000 young people would also be victims of such tragic accidents.

It struck me, because I too had been thinking about phantom children, not at Central High but on the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park, during the big Fourth of July Liberty Weekend celebration, when President Reagan joined the millions who came to see the refurbished Statue of Liberty’s torch relighted.

The following Monday, the tabloid New York Daily News’ front page banner headline roared “IT WAS SOME PARTY”—the historic six-million throng, the story reported, had “one big bash . . . ate 750,000 hot dogs, and drank two million drinks.” There were millions in the subways; the longest lines ever waited above; the statistics ran on and on.

And then this: the “Most Well-Mannered Crowd: the 800,000 at the Central Park Concert.”

There have been many concerts in Central Park, including Rock affairs that got out of hand, with drug disasters, muggings, even riots, involving as many as a half-million “youths” of all ages. But this one was to be different. A half-million people were expected, but the police didn’t expect big troubles from a crowd coming to hear the New York Philharmonic. (Who goes out of control when Zubin Mehta conducts, Yo Yo Ma plays his cello, Itzhak Perlman fiddles, and the soloists are Marilyn Horne, Placido Domingo, and Sherrill Milnes?) The 1,700 cops mobilized were there mainly to handle pedestrian traffic in and out of the park. A police captain said: “Zubin Mehta groupies are not generally trouble-makers.”

And it was a great night, with the enthusiastic crowd exceeding predictions and reaching the 800,000 the News reported. (Have you ever seen that many people in one place?)

On the blistering hot afternoon before the concert I had walked across the Great Lawn on the way to higher ground from which I hoped to view the First Ever Annual Great Blimp Race. The Lawn had begun filling up since early morning; from atop the Belvedere Castle (yes, we did see the five blimps, between buildings) I saw whole families with picnic and “survival” apparatus. But I had no idea of what a capacity crowd on the Great Lawn would look like, until that night, when I watched the concert live on TV and saw the aerial view from the blimps. And when I read Monday’s News,I thought: So that’s what 800,000 looks like.

Numbers have always left me cold: I have No Head for Figures—zeroes and commas play tricks on me: hundreds turn into thousands and vice-versa. From earliest memory (when I told friends about my great-grandmother who died at age 30—actually she was run over by a milk cart at 103) through my first job, when my boss began to look for a new job because, he said, he needed to make a “five-figure salary” (which someone later explained meant $10,000-up) up to the present, my inability to translate figures into what they represent has been a practical disability and a social embarrassment.

So I have had to make a sort of game about numbers. A kind of Sesame Street for adults, where you see the numbers and then envision abstract images. And since adult heads must deal with many more than ten oranges or witches or whatever, there must be an expanded concept: a spatial concept, if hundreds and thousands up to millions are to make any sense.

Time magazine recently had a clever Sesame-Street-type visual aid, for people who can’t conceptualize a sea depth of 12,500 feet, at which the remains of the Titanic lie: ten Empire State buildings were stacked up atop each other. So if you can visualize how tall the Empire State is, you get the idea of how deep is the ocean over the Titanic.

My first numerical-visual aid was 2,000, which was the size of the student body in my high school. When I would hear that some demonstration or celebration had drawn a crowd of something-thousand, I’d remember my high school auditorium as a standard of comparison.

After the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, I began attending the annual March for Life in Washington, and my numbers game expanded: one year there were 35,000 marchers (we stood on a street corner and watched them march by); another year 50,000; one year 70,000. From Capitol Hill one got a conceptual idea of what 70,000 looked like. Anything to do with the million category was still an abstraction. Until my Great Lawn experience.

A few days after I’d read in the News about the 800,000 people at the concert (more than ten times the size of that Washington mob), I received a copy of an ad which had appeared in the New York Times on May 26th (we had not seen it earlier because it was in the Times’ “National Edition,” which goes outside New York). The ad, sponsored by Doctors for Life, offered Congratulations to the 8th Grade Graduates of 1986 and Condolences to “Your classmates who didn’t make it”—the 745,000 souls who would have been 8th grade graduates in 1986 had they not been aborted. The ad said: “Many of you (3,137,000) were born in 1973—the year abortion was legalized. Over 745,000 of your Class of ‘86 were aborted in the same year—the Massacre of 1973.” Now that the figure 800,000 was indelible in my mind, I could “see” 745,000. And 750,000 hot dogs dispensed that Liberty Weekend? Just about one for each absent member of that class. And of course these 8th graders would become, in the fall, the first high school freshman class in American history to have been decimated by abortion. I imagined the Great Lawn filled with silent 8th grade graduates, Class of 1986, standing upright, the ghosts of the Class That Wasn’t There. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Would a vision—a viewing—of the perished help make sense of their sheer numbers, I wondered? Of course there can’t be pictures of my ghosts on the Great Lawn, those victims of “the massacre of 1973.” I remembered the pictures of the mere 900 victims of the Jonestown Massacre. Who can forget all those full-color magazine photos of the victims of fanaticism and cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, lying there on the ground in Guyana. Horrible, we shuddered. Still, though, that happened somewhere else, not “close to home.” Not on Central Park’s Great lawn. But we had seen 800,000 people on the Great Lawn, which is almost exactly half the number of babies unborn-in-America every year, so I could visualize them covering two Great Lawns with a capacity crowd of hosts. Probably all of Central Park could be populated by ghosts, at the current rate of snuffing-out. But 1.6 million is hard to visualize. Break that figure down, though, into the daily rate of snuffing-out, and you get about four thousand ghosts created every day. Twice the size of my high school auditorium. Two full assemblies a day, wiped out: vaporized.

The other day, I caught myself saying (as who doesn’t?) “Gee, thanks a million.” And suddenly I wondered how long it would take to say “thanks” a million times. It would take a lot longer to count to 1.6 million: it is more awesomely horrible to know that that many babies are killed each year.

The ad said that only 600,000 had been killed in all our wars. That amazed me, so I looked it up. The total I found was 652,000 deaths in battle, plus another 500,000-plus “other” war deaths. I looked up that famous disaster, the 1918 Flu epidemic. It killed “only” a half million Americans. I’m told that an estimated 18 million unborn babies have died since Roe v. Wade, which must make abortion the worst epidemic in history.

Dwelling on this tends to make my Numbers Game work too well. Before you know it, you’re thinking: How many each hour, each minute—how many, from here to the subway? That sort of thing.

Especially when there are visual aids, from here to the subway. Each summer day in Manhattan one sees large groups of name-tagged little kids erupting from the subway, being maneuvered along 86th Street toward Central Park: happy, fun-time-anticipating kids, two by two. Their day-camp counselors stop them every so often to take yet another head-count and remind the kids to stick with their partners. My mind wanders and I see one single line of kids. Their buddies aren’t there. One out of how many, I wonder, got vaporized in the few years since these day-campers were born? Nobody can do a head-count of those little ghosts.

Not to overdo it, but there’s another big story in town this summer that makes the abortion issue “hit home”—babies falling out of windows.

One can’t imagine New Yorkers saying: “So what?” when they read that yet another child has fallen to its death from an unbarred window. No: we are compassionate. We agonize over needless deaths. The News (August 11) headlined: “9th child falls to death,” and the New York Times, the same day, told us it was “the 77th time that a child has fallen through a window in the City. Nine of the falls have resulted in deaths, including four within the last three weeks.”

We think: how needless. Why don’t these parents/babysitters learn from the papers about window-bars? We feel for the bereaved parents even as we accuse them of negligence (and as we check our own window-bars).

Even when we know and can quote the statistics about abortion; even when we see the annual statistics broken down into daily and hourly fatalities, we tend—automatically—to make a distinction between statistics and individual victims of preventable fatalities, whose names and ages are reported in the papers, with their baby pictures.

What if the media informed us that, this year, 1.6 million babies would fall to their deaths from unguarded windows? At the rate of about 4,000 daily, almost three every minute? We wouldn’t feel just “compassion” but horror. We’d raise hysterical cries about committing national suicide, about what it all meant for the future.

The reality is that 1.6 million babies were victims of preventable deaths last year. Is there any difference, ultimately? There is no future for the nine small children with names who have died so far this year from window falls: there is the same no-future for the un-named, unbirth-dated babies who are also victims of needless death. But these victims of preventable deaths never make it to the stage where we have “feelings” about them. The 4,000 per day aborted babies are statistics of a different sort; we don’t read about how they died; we don’t know their names; we can be rhetorical about Unborn Millions, but not about three babies falling out of windows every minute, even though the end result is the same. There are no degrees of death.

Maybe it’s because abortion statistics have all those zeroes. We think of the aborted in terms of zeroes if we think about them at all. It’s easier to deal with “mass murder” than to think about individual victims. To think of the victims as one-at-a-time individuals offends one’s sensibilities. But that is how they died, one at a time, just as the window-victims died. Just as the window-victims had been born, one at a time; just as you and I were born, and will die. So the fatalities of legal abortion would have been born one at a time, had they not been “terminated.” Each of the 1.6 million victims unborn in America every year has an identity.

It’s as if the unborn don’t count. They do, however, count up. The next window victim will be the l0th. Somewhere, there has been (or soon will be) abortion victim 18,000,001.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” One wonders if even the most ardent pro-abortionists, given a vision of several empty Great Lawns and knowing what the empty spaces represented, would say: So what? More likely they’d say Yes, but . . . most likely, they’d not say anything, because they are too busy with numbers: theirs. (Stand up and be counted, all in favor of women’s reproductive rights.) Their numbers represent the born who are now free of burdensome unwanted babies.

And what was Ellie Smeal’s National Organization for Women doing in our nation’s capital on July 7th, the day the Daily News raved about New York’s Freedom Party? Picketing the U.S. Catholic bishops, that’s what. About 25 women (that’s a crowd I have no trouble visualizing) bearing signs about Civil Rights, and also carrying umbrellas, marched outside the bishops’ headquarters, chanting: “Let it rain. Let it pour. We know what we’re marching for.”

Ellie Smeal’s supporters had done better last March in Washington: an estimated 80,000 demonstrated for Abortion Rights. On July 7th, they were protesting the bishops’ endorsement of an amendment for the so-called Civil Rights Restoration Act now pending in Congress. They want the government to force institutions to support abortion: that’s what “civil rights” is all about, of course. Indeed, “We know what we’re marching for.” What, not who. So that was how NOW joined in celebrating Liberty Weekend.

NOW cares about now. What about the future? Is their Emperor eternally resplendent in new clothes? Don’t they know that decimated populations will affect everyone? Even if they (being very cerebral people) don’t weep over the unborn, don’t they worry about, say, economics? Don’t they know that they, and the children they have allowed to live, face tremendous financial burdens? That there won’t be enough people for jobs, children for schools, soldiers to defend the nation—and who will take care of the NOW Generation in its old age? One might say that they have their backs to the future. Yet it is often these same people, oblivious to the ramifications of a dwindling population, who crusade for “conservation.” Who ask: Have you thought about the future? Save our trees! Be good to ozone layers. Save the whales. We must not allow this-or-that animal to become extinct. Conserve, preserve! Save our National Parks. (Save our Great Lawns, so that someday they can be empty?)

Erma Bombeck touched on that, too: “The people of this country champion the lives of helpless seals, unborn babies, abandoned dogs and cats, abused children, alcoholics, the elderly and the disease-ridden. When will we weep for the phantom classes at Central High?”

I wish Erma had listed unborn babies next to phantom classes rather than between helpless seals and abandoned animals—I trust Erma would correct this, if she thought about it. After all, what unborn children and her phantom teenagers have in common is that they all are “would-have-beens and should-have-beens.”

There is no doubt that the concert on the Great Lawn had a strong emotional impact on everyone there, as well as on television viewers (some of whom, like us, could rush to our windows to see the fireworks, live, at the grande finale). It was a shared experience, a sort of group emotion. But such “emotional experiences” can lead to a heightened perception of reality.

When I read the Doctors for Life ad, and had that spatial-visual concept of how many ghosts there must now be from sea to shining sea, I felt “personally” involved. I felt the reality of how many aren’t, and won’t ever be, there to share in our So Proudly Hailing; to join in the final Ode to Joy, which had everyone standing up. Then everyone sang God Bless America (even Kate Smith would have been impressed). In the land of the free and the home of the brave, these twilight ghosts were unfree to ask God to bless America. For them, freedom’s birthday had come too late.

More from Erma Bombeck’s column: “The halls echoed with school songs that were never sung, valedictorians who never spoke and cheers that were never heard.”

The News had also mentioned, in connection with the well-behaved 800,000, that 1,200 plastic bags had been given to the concert-goers, to clean up after themselves; and that they’d left behind only 250 cubic yards of trash. I do not have a concept of cubic yards, but I figured 250 of them must be a mere drop in the sanitation truck bucket. And then I remembered stories I’d read about the disposal of fetuses, in just such trash bags, and I had no wish to conceptualize. I did not want to play my Numbers Game.

A few years ago President Reagan published a book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation. Conscience has to do with knowing and feeling, it seems to me: a conscience is formed by the working-together of the heart and the mind. If there is one point of agreement on both sides of the abortion issue, it is that this is “a battle for hearts and minds.” It has to be fought in the courts, but nothing will ultimately change until hearts and minds do. Whichever gets most involved first doesn’t seem to matter all that much, since eventually both must come together. If we are whole—and I don’t know anyone who would like to be considered fragmented.

There are dedicated anti-abortion people who feel so deeply about the unborn that they use sheer emotional bombardment as a weapon. You know, all those graphic pictures, etc. But people will not see what they don’t want to see. Shock tactics simply turn them off.

Then there are those whose approach is basically cerebral: they know that seeing is not necessarily believing; nevertheless they are convinced that seeing statistics will lead to comprehension. (If people only knew the facts about unborn babies, they would rise up and say: “This killing has got to stop!”) Which is a bit like saying: if teenagers only knew the Facts of Life, they’d stop getting pregnant—education is the answer. But we know that a whole generation of Sex Ed has produced the highest pregnancy/ abortion rate in history.

Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation? It may be that until there is a coming-together of seeing and believing and knowing, in individual consciences, there can’t be any formation of a national conscience; and 1.5 or 1.6 million—all those innocent zeroes—will continue to be slaughtered, one at a time, every few seconds, every single year. But their little ghosts will continue to not go away.

The nonsensical nursery rhyme becomes less nonsensical:

The other day Upon the stair I saw a man

Who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today: I wish that man

Would go away.

_________________________________________

Original bio:
Faith Abbott McFadden (1931-2011), a longtime senior editor, co-founded the Human Life Review with her husband J.P. McFadden in 1975. “Ghosts on the Great Lawn,” her first article for the Review (Fall 1986), was followed over the years by thirty more, including “Remembering ‘Sir Bill,’” her moving reflection on the death of the Review’s friend and benefactor, William Buckley.