Abortion is a crisis in our nation. 55 million babies have died because of it.

But 55 million is a difficult number to relate to. It’s hard for me to picture 55 million of anything. The number is just unimaginable.

So, when I need some perspective, I look at abortion numbers in my home community. Below is a list from the Pennsylvania Department of Health with the number of babies who died in abortions by county in 2012.

When I look at the list and the number beside my county, it reminds me of how real abortion is. I wonder whose baby isn’t crying next door, or whose child I won’t see playing in the park down the street. I think about how there will be nine fewer children starting kindergarten in a few years.

It can be easy to distance ourselves from the reality that abortion brutally kills preborn babies. So, I challenge you to think about the babies who aren’t here anymore, the babies who would have been. Please find your county and think about the number after it. If you’re a praying person, pray.

And then I challenge you to act. Get involved in protecting life in your community. With your help, we can get these numbers down to zero and restore protections for every single human life.

(Please forgive me for the poor quality of these documents. I was having trouble formatting them. If you would like to see the numbers in the full report from the state Department of Health, click here. They are located on pages 4-5.)

Today, I want to share our new graph of Pennsylvania’s abortion numbers in the past 13 years. I like looking at graphs and numbers and the trends that they show.

This new graph shows a downward trend in the number of abortions performed in our state. In just one year, abortion numbers dropped by 5 percent. That’s encouraging.

Sometimes, though, I get so caught up in looking at the numbers that I forget about what they represent. We lost 34,536 human lives in our state to abortion – in just one year.

I want to encourage you that when you look at this graph, don’t just look at the bars and the numbers. Think about the faces and smiles of these missing children. Think about a baby’s laugh or piercing cry. Think about them crawling, then talking, then imagining and dreaming. And remember how all of this was cut short when that baby lost his or her life to abortion.

Yes, we need to look at these numbers. They help us to understand what is happening in our state and what can be done to keep the abortion rate declining.

But we can’t stop there. We need to look, make a plan, and then take action, because these aren’t just numbers on a page. Every number represents a precious human life lost to abortion.

The other evening, I burst into tears at a comedy routine.

My husband and I were watching the show on the internet when the comedian started talking about children. I’m terribly at telling jokes, so I won’t even try to be funny in retelling it. Basically, the comedian observed the different social reactions to how many children families have. One child, and people coo and aww. Two children? Well, ok. But three children?! Are you crazy?!

I know, I know. It was just a joke. But it made me cry because it reminded me of a much bigger issue in our society: the worth we place on children.

I seem to see it all over the place lately, from simple things like apps that let you block baby pictures from your Facebook feed and restaurants that ban children under a certain age, to cover stories on Time magazine about couples choosing to be childless and jokes about large families, to problems with huge implications like declining birth rates and abortion.

When I think about 36,000 abortions in our state every year, my heart breaks for these precious babies whose lives weren’t valued.

Now, I don’t have anything against jokes about children. Nor do I want to criticize couples who don’t have children – I’m in that category myself. I just find this negative attitude about children so troubling.

It reminds me of the character Aibileen from the book, “The Help.” She was a black maid in the south during the 1960s. Many of her employers didn’t value her because of the color of her skin, so I guess it’s no surprise that they also didn’t care much about their own children.

Aibileen made it her mission to help children understand their value. She would take her young charges aside, sit them on her lap, and ask them to repeat after her: “I is kind. I is smart. I is important.”

I wonder what the world would be like if we had more people like Aibileen — people who look beyond someone’s appearance or abilities, look beyond the annoyance or expense they can sometimes be, and value others for the very simple reason that they, too, are human beings.