For well over two decades America’s inconsistent legal stance on abortion has dismayed me.
Whenever I have read of some hapless soul who has thrown her newborn into a garbage can or an incinerator, I have wondered in print how any court could justly condemn the mother/murderer, since that same court is required by law to uphold the right of medical personnel to dispose of the same infant as long as they do their killing a few minutes earlier than the mother did.
This makes no sense to me, and I’ve raised the issue repeatedly. When decent people with sharp minds have questioned the legitimacy of my argument, however, I’ve wondered at times if I was the one missing the point.
Up in Delaware, Brian Peterson and his girlfriend Amy Grossberg vindicated my argument so horribly that columnists and reporters across the land began to echo my concerns.
In a motel Brian helped Amy give birth to their illegitimate son. Authorities found the full-term baby in a trash bin the next day, wrapped in a gray plastic bag. He had died of a fractured skull.
Except for the names and a few details, George Will’s column about this ghastly crime was almost a carbon copy of a dozen columns I’ve written about similar cases over the past 15 years.
Outraged by the killing, prosecutors filed first-degree murder charges against Brian and Amy and said they would seek the death penalty.
“How can this be?” Will asks Americans. If it is legal for a doctor to puncture the baby’s skull and evacuate his tiny brain 10 minutes before he is born (and it is legal, since a ban on partial birth abortions has been continually vetoed), how can we charge the baby’s parents with murder for doing essentially the same thing 10 minutes later?
Brian and Amy were clean-cut college freshmen. U.S. News called them “monsters,” echoing the sentiments of most Americans. What those “good kids” from “good homes” did to their baby is unthinkable. Unless you do it in a clinic. Then it’s a legally protected constitutional right. Right?