Bret Schundler
Mayor, Jersey City, New Jersey

Anyone who questions whether respect for human life is under assault in contemporary America only has to look at what happened here in Jersey City two weekends ago. The dead body of a newborn baby girl was found at a Jersey City sewage treatment plant amid garbage that had been filtered from sewage, a reflection of our disposable society where until a moment before birth, a child can be legally aborted by its parents if they consider that its life would be inconvenient. The plant foreman who found the body thought at first it was a doll, not believing someone could be so callous as to kill their child and dispose of it down a manhole cover.

The grizzly discovery was shocking even to those whose senses have been numbed by previous well-publicized tragedies like the case of Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson, the former lovers who now stand accused of murdering their just-born infant, and the case of Melissa Drexler, who is accused of giving birth to, and immediately killing, her baby at her senior prom.

Yet while we are all aghast at the circumstances of the death of the baby found at the sewage plant (which the police are, in fact, investigating as a case of murder), what would have been the story had it been discovered that this fully formed baby had been secretly aborted and then disposed of? The law would say that the abortion was legal. Yet all those who have not totally deadened their hearts to human sensitivity would still be repulsed.

Abortion has become one of the most divisive issues in American politics. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers talk about the subject as if they were speaking a different language. This makes bridging the political gap impossible. Both sides find compromise not just impractical, but immoral. But these horrific incidents of infanticide should refocus everyone's attention on the continued coarsening of American society and move us to at least reason together about the immorality of late-term abortions.

Indeed, reasonable Americans may disagree over the question of when human life should be constitutionally protected, but a strong consensus already exists supporting the proposition that unborn babies in the final weeks of development deserve the full protection of the law. Our society must resuscitate its respect for the sacredness of human life, but that will never happen as long as we permit legal abortions right up until the very moment of birth. We need to recognize the connection between the tragedy of late-term, partial-birth abortions and the tragedy of nameless newborns being murdered. Failure to do so will not lead us towards a more free society, but to one where human life is no more valued than the general debris in our sewage systems, and where the powerful believe they may justly eliminate the weak and voiceless whenever it is convenient.

We can, and must, reason together and be willing to take action on this vital moral issue. On this, reasonable people can agree.