"I wish I could have my nice body back," she whined. "As soon as everything gets better, I'll be my sweet, normal self. We'll be able to uh-uuh lots. I really miss it." About the pregnancy, she wrote, "All I want is for it to go away." (She declined an abortion for fear her mother would discover it.)
These youngsters are not monsters. They are quite normal. Grossberg was probably trained at school to have lots of self-esteem. She was also instructed - not just at school but by the Supreme Court, by a president who supports abortion rights and by most of elite opinion - that abortion is a morally acceptable solution to an unwanted pregnancy.
In Delaware, she could have reported for a late-term abortion at almost any time up until the birth. In fact, just days before Peterson and Grossberg were sentenced, an Arizona abortionist started to perform that procedure on a fetus he had been told was 23 or 24 weeks old. Only after the procedure began did he realize that the baby was actually a 6 pound, 2 ounce baby girl at full term. He delivered the child alive - but with a fractured skull and two large lacerations on her face - the results of the aborted abortion.
So there is really no surprise that Amy Grossberg - her "sweet, normal self" - can have believed that her unwanted baby just seconds after birth is just as disposable as an unwanted fetus at midterm. Melissa Drexler, who gave birth in a toilet at her prom, the mother who left her newborn in a bathroom at Disneyworld, and the others who have left babies to die in the cold or drown in toilets in cities around the nation are acting on the same insight - there is no intrinsic value or sacredness to life. What gives life value is the desire of the mother.
What else are these young women to conclude? We permit a pregnant woman to sue if her fetus is harmed by environmental or other hazards - because she wants the baby. If not, she can kill it.
The judge revealed his own peculiar moral standards by ruling that 24 months for Peterson and 30 months for Grossberg was sufficient punishment for treating a newborn infant like an empty shoe box. He also sentenced the couple to perform 300 hours of community service - including working in clinics for pregnant teenagers and "counseling teenagers on parenthood." That's what we need - child killers lecturing on what it means to be a parent!
Even the prosecutors seem to have been confused about the gravity of the case. Praising Peterson for his cooperation with authorities, one prosecutor said, "He was chivalrous, but stupid." So the code of chivalry now includes killing the defenseless - even one's own baby?
Yes, feelings seem to have trumped absolute values quite thoroughly. The feelings of the mother, not the child made in the image and likeness of God, determine the baby's value. In Janesville, Wis., a 37-year-old man was sentenced to 12 years in prison - for killing cats.
They were wanted cats.
- - - Mona Charen, a former editorial writer for the National Review, was a member of the communications staff in the Reagan White House.
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