Orrin Hatch: “we have all heard the shocking accounts of teenaged girls giving birth and then dumping their newborns into trash cans.…”

“we have all heard the shocking accounts of teenaged girls giving birth and then dumping their newborns into trash cans. One young woman from Delaware gave birth in a bathroom stall during her prom, and then proceeded to strangle and suffocate her child, leaving his body in the garbage. Cases in Maryland and Arkansas tell similar stories. Criminal charges were recently brought against a young woman in my home state of Utah for secretly giving birth in her parent's Salt Lake City home and then leaving the baby to die in a drawer. As I read these accounts, I find myself wondering about the blurry line which exists between late-term abortions and infanticide. William Raspberry argued in a July 13, 1998, column in the Washington Post: a ``short distance [exists] between what [these teenagers] have been sentenced for doing and what doctors get paid to do.'' Few people would dispute that such incidents constitute murder. Any cruelty or intentional harm inflicted on a defenseless child causes anger to rise in all of us, particularly when a variety of services exist to assist the parents with their responsibilities--or even, through foster care or adoption, to relieve them entirely. I have sympathy for any young woman who contemplates an abortion. Surely this is a difficult decision to make. The circumstances that drive a woman to it must certainly be complex and appear to her to be insoluble. But, the late-term partial birth abortion is not an ordinary abortion.…”