The Prom Mom

In 1997, a pregnant girl named Melissa Drexler went into labor at her senior prom. She was in the ladies room by herself, and she gave birth. And she discarded the baby in a trash can. Nobody discovered the baby for several days, and of course the baby died. Nicknamed the Prom Mom, she was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and served three.

Did she kill her baby? Well, she didn't inject poison into it. She didn't hack into with a knife. She just abandoned it and walked away. Exercising her liberty and autonomy. And the baby died. The baby died because it's really small and helpless and weak and can't take care of itself. A baby is not an autonomous human being.

Melissa's baby, as Plato and Aristotle would tell you, was non-viable. This, in fact, is the viability doctrine of the ancient Greeks in action. Abandon your child, it's totally cool. And smart people still agree with this.

An Ivy League scholar at Princeton, Peter Singer, argues that parents should have two years to decide if they want to terminate their offspring. He writes books about killing your small child. "They're dumber than dogs." I'm paraphrasing. I'm summing up. He thinks we ought to love animals more and human infants less.

An Oxford professor of jurisprudence, Ronald Dworkin, writes, "a human being has no moral right to life...until sometime after birth." Man! Oxford. Now, I just went to a second-tier law school, but I kinda think that's some madman shit right there. I'll bet Dworkin has trouble getting baby-sitter gigs.

I mean, even my dog Scout knows he should lick babies and not eat them. And he barely made it out of Petsmart obedience school.

What is up with these elite scholars wanting to kill little infants? It's that fucking Plato, man.

Infanticide theory today is infanticide practice tomorrow. Hell, if Ms. Drexler was a little more savvy, she would have killed her baby while she was delivering it. For her health. None of this "spend three years in jail to think about your crime" stuff.

I kind of think if Ms. Drexler was a happy mom, and some man took her baby from her, and threw it off a bridge--you know, "ha ha, your baby's in the river"--I kinda think we would throw the book at his ass. The reason we would throw the book at his ass, is because happy moms scream bloody murder when you kill their baby. So that guy is getting 99 years to think about it.

We are way cooler with moms killing their own babies than we are with psycho strangers killing mom's baby. I guess we figure, remembering our own mom, that moms love their babies. If a mom doesn't love her baby, man. Must be something wrong with that baby. It's a bad baby.