'Prom Mom's' Cold-Blooded Act No Different From Late-Term Abortion

By GREGORY J. RUMMO
THE NEW JERSEY HERALD, DECEMBER 2,  2001

    THIS PAST MONDAY, in New Jersey, the “Prom Mom,” 23-year old Melissa Drexler was scheduled to be released from prison after completing 37 months of a 15-year term for aggravated manslaughter in the death of her newborn baby. Miss Drexler was a high school senior when she gave birth to a 6lb. 6oz. boy in the ladies room at Aberdeen Township catering hall during her prom on June 6, 1997. She had hidden the pregnancy from everyone, including her parents and her boyfriend. Prosecutors said Drexler had strangled the baby and then threw the body into a trashcan.

One imagines the scene inside that bathroom stall as Miss Drexler, then an 18-year old, went into labor and delivered that little baby. What happened next can only be described as an act of cold-blooded cruelty--something to make your flesh crawl…

But hold on for a minute.

What makes this an obvious act of cold-blooded cruelty is the simple fact that we can actually imagine it happening. It’s palpable. Restrooms, young girls attending their senior prom and little babies are all familiar, every day icons.

A more chilling scenario is this: Had Melissa Drexler gone to an abortion clinic several days before her prom, the results would have been the same-one dead 6lb. 6oz. baby boy and one relieved teenager. But she would have never been charged for a crime or spent a day in prison.

The difference between being charged with a crime for killing a baby in the state of New Jersey and just simply killing a baby is subtle. It’s only a matter of several inches; the distance from the inside to the outside of the birth canal.

A paper published by Citizen Link.org earlier this year in February entitled “The Status of Abortion in America,” explains why: “In 1973, two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton, radically changed the legal landscape of American abortion law. The combined effect of the rulings required abortion to be legal for any woman, regardless of her age and legal for any reason during the first seven months of pregnancy, and for virtually any reason thereafter.”

Here in New Jersey, on December 8, 1998, a federal court struck down the state's partial birth abortion ban, permanently blocking it from taking effect. The issue of killing a viable fetus by a procedure that has been branded as infanticide by many lawmakers will ultimately be decided in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, our society continues to send confusing signals to teenagers. For almost three decades we have ignored the fundamental right to life--a right clearly endowed to us by God and stated explicitly in our Declaration of Independence--and have allowed elected officials, backed by liberals in the media and defended by judges in the courts, to legalize the systematic destruction of babies because of a recently discovered “right” called a woman’s right to privacy.

What were the missing elements in Melissa Drexler’s case--those things that would have made a young girl’s heinous actions perfectly acceptable to our perverted legal system? If an accomplice--another word for a doctor in this case--had carried out the procedure, and if the crime scene had been the confines of an abortion clinic rather than a bathroom stall, then there’d be no story here. But killing babies behind the closed doors of an abortion clinic does not magically transform manslaughter into a “medical procedure.”

Our delusion is strong.

What Melissa Drexler’s story does to us is it makes us uncomfortable. There’s a corpse that reaches out through the delusion and shakes us. We are brought face to face with the awful reality that a baby--flesh and blood--has died. And we don’t like being confronted with that reality. As the truth slowly settles over us, it begins to gnaw away at our consciences and we realize that this was really no different than a late term abortion.

It doesn’t take much imagination to figure that out. n

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