FIRST let’s combine the populations of New York and L.A. (That’s Los Angeles, not Lower Arkansas.) If estimates back in 2012 are close, that’s 8.3 million in New York and 3.8 million in Los Angeles.

That’s 12.1 million.

Let’s throw in Dallas and its 1.2 million people.

That’s 13.3 million, if the calculator is right. (Math was never our strong suit.)

Now, how about the 1.4 million people who live in Phoenix, the 2.7 million in Chicago and the 2.1 million in Houston.

Now add the population of Little Rock and Fort Smith and Mena and Pine Bluff and West Memphis and Magnolia and Harrison and El Dorado . . . .

Let’s just say we’ll add in every soul living in the state of Arkansas, and even round up to 3 million from what the stats tell us is only 2.9 million.

Then our total comes to 22.5 million. Almost halfway there. Almost.

Let’s include the total populations of Philly, San Diego, Indianapolis, San Francisco and Charlotte, too.

Whew.

Now we’re getting closer to 28 million people. Not quite, but almost.

To speed things up, let’s add the populations of these states: Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Nevada (including Las Vegas, of course), Nebraska, West Virginia and Idaho.

Our total now is getting closer to 55 million, if the estimates are close. That’s a lot of people.

Or maybe not. It may depend on whom you ask. And how you think. And feel. Because to some of us, not all people are people, let alone created equal. Not if they’re still in embryo-“safe as a child in its mother’s womb” as the old, now outdated phrase had it. But they don’t count. They’re not people. They have no right to life, let alone liberty or the pursuit of happiness. They can be, uh, terminated.

SOME estimates show that 55 million abortions have been performed since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land in 1973. Last weekend, folks held marches and rallies all over the country to mark the 41st anniversary of that decision-pro and con.

If the marches in Arkansas on both sides of this still-boiling question were different, the difference was in more than size. For some this was a day to celebrate a great victory, a landmark decision to note in the annals of justice finally done. For others, like us, like more and more of us, it was a day of mourning. Mourning for all the millions of unborn, cut off even before they saw the first light of day. A day to remember them, and renew our commitment to life.

This country wasn’t supposed to be still debating this issue so long after Roe v. Wade was handed down. To quote a headline in the New York Times the day after that decision was announced: “Supreme Court settles abortion issue.” Settles. Ends. As in a settled issue, or settled law. But once again, the paper of record recorded it wrong. Nothing has been settled. Indeed, no question remains so . . . unsettled. And unsettling.Yep, the Times was as reliable a source of news analysis back then as it is now.

In state after state, legislatures are passing new laws to restrict abortion. In response to popular demand. So the great debate goes on. And on and on. Why? Because some questions-like American slavery-aren’t settled till they’re settled right. Because they’re not just political or legal or social questions. They’re moral questions, and that makes all the difference.

Where are we now on this question, and whither are we tending? That’s the same thing a man named Lincoln asked when the country stood on the brink of settling another great question-a moral question even though there were many then, too, who would have liked to dismiss it as just a transient issue. An issue that could surely be compromised, safely ignored, put off forever or dismissed some other way. Why bring right and wrong into it? Morality only complicates things.

So, in 2014, whither are we tending, according to today’s ever volatile polls? Whatever an older generation might have approved or just accepted, younger Americans seem to be turning against abortion. Yes, even if they’ve grown up in a culture that adopted it decades ago-a Culture of Death.

These young people may not have the old labels and catch phrases from the ’70s still bouncing around in their heads: Choice. Women’s Rights. Reproductive Freedom. It seems their vocabularies haven’t been adequately sanitized. They don’t realize that Termination of Pregnancy sounds so much better than abortion.

But kids these days. You never can tell when they’ll up and start calling things by their right names. They might even call abortion abortion, or life life, and death death. How tactless.

ABORTION’S toll is up to 55 million now. And counting. Yet some folks, thousands of them, will still march in the cold and frigid air to defend it. But the children see. And see through it. And speak out. In plain English, not newspeak. How refreshing. Candor can have that effect.

May you young people join those in the older generation who can no longer keep silent, either. Not in the face of evil, even if it has become an institution. For what was once recognized as a crime now has become common practice. And claimed millions. Fifty-five million.

It’s happened before. Holocausts tend to have their precedents, their rationalizations, their sleights of language that turn evil into good. Verbicide proceeds homicide, so that what once was frightful becomes habitual.

Defenders of abortion explain that it’s really best for all. All those unwanted millions would only have cluttered up the planet. They would have interfered with the vision of a well-ordered, less crowded, neater and perfected world. What better way, after all, to fight poverty and its ills than to see that the poor are never born?

You could call abortion this administration’s anti-poverty program. To quote W. H. Auden in his “Epitaph on a Tyrant”-“Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after . . . He knew human folly like the back of his hand . . .”

One young lady in Washington wasn’t having any of it. She was interviewed while making her way through the snowbanks and bitter cold, on crutches no less, in still another march for life. Why? To quote her response when she was asked why she would be out there tramping around in this foul weather: “This is only a temporary thing. Not being born is forever.”

Marchers like Raneem Alayoubi may not win out in the end. But they will make their witness. And they will leave behind a message: This culture of death may be imposed on still another generation-but not without resistance.

March on.

Editorial, Pages 76 on 01/26/2014