CHILDREN WITHOUT SOULS

By MARGARET CARLSON

About the time most prospective parents are obsessing over what color to paint the nursery, Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson Jr. were acquiring a gray garbage bag with yellow drawstrings and a map of Newark, Delaware, to help them find a Comfort Inn off the highway, where birth and death could come and go in a moment. Was there ever a second when one of them was shocked by the horror of it all and said, "No, we can't do this. Have we lost our minds?" only to be talked back into it by the other? Did they hear a cry or blurt out, "It's a boy"? Afterward, they slept for a few hours and took the car to the White Glove Car Wash.

When a poor, black 13-year-old from the Bronx leaves her newborn to die, we go on about our business, but we are gripped when two affluent white teenagers do the same thing. Yes, there's race and class. But there is also our belief that it is society in its dysfunctional state that yields ruthless behavior, not society when it is working to give our kids the best of everything, including private help when things go wrong. Of course, the dark side of kids who have everything is that they cannot tolerate one blemish on their smooth lives.

Pro-life advocates seized upon the crime as the logical end to the slippery slope of abortion rights. It offered an occasion to revisit the effort to close a "health of mother" loophole that allows partial-birth abortions, not just for women in dire straits but teenagers who have changed their minds. You don't have to be persuaded that the difference between what Amy and Brian did and a third-trimester abortion is only time (a couple of weeks) and place (a $56-a-night motel rather than a clinic) to retreat to a dark corner of your conscience and fathom what is right.

Certainly watching a father turn his son in because that son has killed his grandchild is heart wrenching. So was the sight of Barbara Peterson hiding her head in her son's soft fleece jacket, one she may have bought for him to wear on cool November days as co-captain of his soccer team, as she walked him into the courthouse. But perhaps his conscience had been warped somewhere along the way by these same parents. His mother's weeklong reaction was to keep her son from authorities and consider helping him escape punishment altogether after he admitted, minimally, to putting the baby into a plastic bag and hurling it into a dumpster. She may have been modeling herself after the parents of another privileged teenager who provided their son Alex Kelly with a life of European ease after he was accused of rape. Surely a lion must protect her cub, but there's a point when instinct must give way to morality.

By week's end, Baby Boy Grossberg was being reclaimed from the morgue by his grandparents, who will name him before burying him. Defense lawyers are urging us not to rush to judgment, which is surely a prelude to a rush to explain and a plea to excuse. One attorney said, "Brian, the individual, the human being, the nice, normal kid, has been displayed, and I think that it gives the public a different perspective, and I think it's helpful." Helpful to whom? Not to a moral life. There are monsters among us who, with wealthy parents and a battalion of lawyers, tap a culture ready to forget the victim and forgive the accused, especially if they remind us of ourselves. But not this time, not this evil.