Really Late Term Abortion

I hesitate to address this story but as I sit here watching the latest "breaking news" about the apparent finding of the remains of the missing Florida girl, Caylee Anthony, it occurs to me that intense moral outrage being expressed by members of the press (and many others) toward Caylee's mother, Casey, is not just a little hypocritical. Let me explain.

One CNN commentator (Jane? a woman I have never seen before but her name is irrelevant) reports that this case betrays an attitude that is "sadly repeated to a lesser degree all over this country every day." Her reasoning?

Casey Anthony didn't want her little girl.

I was unaware of the fact that Caylee's mom tried to give her daughter to a friend at some time in the recent past. It seems that Caylee was cramping her partying lifestyle. Apparently, the case ended up before a judge who insisted that Casey keep her daughter and own up to her responsibility to care for her. Casey wasn't happy about it. So now we have a motive for the murder of Caylee.

To be fair, Casey Anthony has not been convicted of anything. She is innocent until proven guilty. I want to emphasize that my comments here have nothing to do with her guilt of innocence. All I want to do is point out the warped thinking that was exposed in the obvious implications of the CNN commentator who reported the story. To paraphrase her comments, she finds it objectionable that a judge forced Casey Anthony to keep a daughter she didn't want. She should have been allowed to get rid of her if she wanted to. In this commentator's mind, the judge's decision runs parallel to those who, by attempting to deny the "right" to abortion, would force women to keep children they don't want either.

I don't want to give the impression that this CNN commentator sympathizes with, or somehow condones this horrific crime. She doesn't. And she says so over and over again. But the implication of the comments she offered in the monologue she used to open her show was an obvious comparison of Casey Anthony's morally horrific decision and the same kind of decision that is made all over this country every day -- the decision to abort and those who would oppose it.

Why is it that Casey Anthony's selfish murder of her own offspring is reprehensible but the same decision, made for the exact same reasons, by a woman who does so while the child is in-utero, is defended as a private choice about which none of us (especially a man who can't even become pregnant) should have anything to say.

Casey Anthony has not been convicted of anything. But the sad fact is that it seems that Casey Anthony chose to administer her own version of a really late term abortion. It is a sad fact that Scott Peterson, another infamous person whose crime was a national news story, was convicted of two murders when he killed his wife and unborn child in California in 2002. In each case, the child in question could have met the same fate, for the same reasons, at the hand of an abortionist and you would never have heard of either one of them.

Somehow that just doesn't make sense.