Navigating A Distressing Timeline

Let’s not mince words over the central facts. The evidence was overwhelming that Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg killed their newborn baby nearly two years ago, and dumped him in a motel trash bin.

The medical examiner said the infant died of shaking and a fractured skull, blowing away the young lovers’ earlier contention of a stillbirth. Both parents, each 18 years old at the time, later pleaded to manslaughter. They were sentenced last week in a Wilmington, Del., court. She will serve 2-1/2 years in prison. He will serve two.

Still …

It’s not just their tender age, their derailed dreams of college, and their obvious remorse that evoke a measure of sympathy for what they did, if not for how they did it. It is also - for me, at least - the realization of what a short distance there is between what they have been sentenced for doing and what doctors get paid to do.

I’m not speaking here of the law. The law may be confusing on many aspects of abortion - trimesters, viability, that sort of thing - but it is clear on the difference between abortion and infanticide. No, I’m speaking of the ethics of the taking of life. I’m speaking, I suppose, of the aesthetics of ethics.

If some time before the Nov. 12, 1996, birth of their baby boy Brian and Amy had gotten an abortion, you wouldn’t know their names. The youngsters might have been embarrassed - isn’t that why they contrived to keep the pregnancy secret right till the end? - but there would have been no crime.

The difference, to repeat, seems to me as much a matter of aesthetics as of ethics.

My squeamishness about abortion increases directly as the baby becomes more incontrovertibly a person. It is why I am not particularly upset by the thought of aborting a days-old pregnancy. It is also why so many of us who fancy ourselves pro-choice get annoyed at anti-abortionists who display those person-looking photographs of dead fetuses. It may even be why the U.S. Supreme Court found itself debating trimesters.

It is almost certainly a part of the distinction we make between even late-term abortion and the infanticide that has Amy and Brian going to prison.

The same day they were sentenced in Wilmington, The Associated Press reported on a case in Phoenix where a doctor started a procedure to abort what he thought was a 23-week-old fetus. A short time later, he was delivering a 6-pound, 2-ounce full-term baby girl. The infant, who suffered a fractured skull and facial cuts during what is known as a partial-birth abortion, was put up for adoption by the 17-year-old mother.

My first thought was: Suppose the doctor had gone forward with the partial-birth abortion - the procedure during which a late-term fetus is partly delivered through the birth canal and its brain vacuumed out to allow the head to be collapsed. Would it have been a crime? Would it have been unethical?

For sure it would have been unaesthetic, and too close to infanticide, which is one reason I keep hoping the pro-choice leadership will step forward to oppose partial-birth abortion under all but the most extraordinary circumstances.

In the Phoenix case, the 17-year-old came to the A-Z clinic, underwent an ultrasound examination and was told to return the following day for the abortion.

“Sounds like a grave error was made in estimation of the size,” an Arizona Right to Life official said. “With an ultrasound, there shouldn’t be that kind of discrepancy.”

And I think again: There shouldn’t be that kind of procedure.

And even while I’m saying it, I confess to being driven as much by aesthetic considerations as by ethical ones - by what I see in my mind’s eye when I think of partial-birth abortion.

I’m troubled as well by what I think of as the right-on-red syndrome. If abortions, like right turns on red lights, are legitimate under certain circumstances, logic and pragmatism will lead some of us to seek to expand the range of permissible circumstances.

We’ve seen the result in the case of right-on-red: a growing disregard for traffic signals - perhaps for traffic laws in general.

Will we reach the point where what Amy and Brian did will someday be described, benignly, as a “very late-term abortion”?