Statistics are curious things and subject to all kinds of chicanery. Mark Twain's comment about statistics (borrowed from British P.M. Benjamin Disraeli) is one of the best ever penned by a humorist: "There are lies, damned lies...and then there are statistics."

The adolescent chatter about crowd sizes in the last few weeks − i.e. who had the biggest number of people at their march − is reminiscent of schoolyard and locker room contests down through the ages. But the numbing figure of 56 million world-wide abortions every year (see July 2016 study published in The Lancet) hardly gets questioned or noticed any more − even in many of our churches.

A million such deaths (for abortion is a death) would be more than a moral catastrophe, two million a genocide, 10 million a 'holocaust'...but 56 million is a crime against humanity that far exceeds those of the last century or any other century. Looking the other way at the numbers will not make this grievous issue disappear, nor will protests about so-called women's reproductive rights.

The slavery divide couldn't be dealt with by political compromise − it took a great and bloody civil war to do that. We can only hope and pray that this time truth will win out. 

Peter Wilson

Groton