PROM NIGHTMARE

By MARGARET CARLSON

Depravity was defined downward last week, six months after two New Jersey teenagers--who had been given everything but a conscience--delivered a baby boy and briskly disposed of him in a Dumpster before heading to the White Glove Car Wash to rinse off the blood. Now we have Melissa Drexler, who slipped into the bathroom at her senior prom, delivered a 6-lb. 6-oz. baby boy and tossed him in the trash basket with the soiled paper towels in time to get back to the party. She asked the disk jockey to play her favorite Metallica song and danced with her boyfriend. A student told a reporter later, "She seemed to be enjoying herself."

Cleaning up after themselves, as Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson did, seems like a quaint gesture of guilt next to a hasty return to the prom for a postpartum spin around the dance floor. There's not a flicker of humanity in these cases, and there are more of them being reported, if not more of them happening. No one keeps comprehensive statistics on abandoned babies, but in Los Angeles County last year, there were 10 newborns left to die; two summers ago, three were discarded in Southern California beach communities. In Monmouth County, N.J., where Drexler left her baby, there were 12 abandoned babies in the past 10 years. But four New Jersey teenagers have abandoned babies in the past six months alone.

Whenever these grisly abandonments occur, right-to-life proponents argue that we've arrived at the bottom of the slippery slope they've been warning us about since Roe v. Wade in 1973. As usual, Newt Gingrich goes too far when he talks about a culture of Dumpster babies, but why couldn't Melissa have wrapped the baby in a cloth and left him, as panicked girls used to do, someplace safe like the church steps, or turn to the Yellow Pages, filled with "pregnancy counseling" and "abortion alternatives"?

The newspaper ads suggesting that girls were having third-trimester abortions because they couldn't fit into their prom dresses remain pro-life hyperbole, but the Roman Catholic bishops who ran them are right when they say there is almost no difference between the prom Mom and a woman having a third-trimester abortion, except for location and a few days.

The bishops lost moral high ground, however, when they tossed in the Dumpster the best chance to restrict late-term abortions since abortion was made legal. An astonishing thing happened during the debate over a bill to ban partial-birth abortions, which has no chance of actually becoming law, and wouldn't result in even one less abortion even if it did. Alarmed to learn of the many third-trimester abortions performed after six months, under milewide exceptions for vague reasons of mental health, Democratic Senator Thomas Daschle introduced a bill that would have banned all abortions in which the baby could have lived outside the womb, which these days means after about 23 weeks. Yet Republicans preferred to cling to their own doomed bill rather than give up a potent political issue or accept Daschle's exception to the ban for women whose pregnancies could cause "grievous physical injury"--even though that closes the mental-health loophole. If it's disregard for life that turns girls like Melissa into murderous monsters, then the Republicans need look no farther than themselves for someone to blame.