Background: Holly Ashcraft is charged with killing her newborn infant by tossing him in a dumpster near here apartment when a safe surrender site was a mere 42 seconds away from the murder scene. Not surprisingly, the immense media coverage of the crime has presented an excellent vehicle for those interested in promoting their own agendas.

We at Independent Sources are not immune to this. We have a personal cause of being against infanticide (yes, we think it’s bad) so we took the opportunity of the exposure of Holly’s case to promote Safe Surrender.

However, when it comes to taking a baby killing to promote a personal cause, we were humbled by Louise Marie Roth (assistant sociology professor at the University of Southern California where Ashcroft goes to school). Roth is using the murder of Holly’s baby to attack abstinence-only teaching by taking the leap that Ashcroft may have felt that the death of her newborn infant was less morally repugnant than admitting to premarital sex:

“I suspect that students who receive strict abstinence-only messages and no other messages about sexuality feel that they have no social resources to turn to if they get pregnant,” (Snipped) [source: Area 417]

Hmmm. We suspect that a scholarship student studying architecture at a major university would be smart enough to understand that there is a difference between being judged for having premarital sex and being judged for killing one (and possibly two) infants. In the first case, people may talk to you and you can choose to listen to them or not–arguably no one is hurt. In the second case, you have killed a human being. If someone has trouble determining the right course of action then they are in need of a serious moral realignment–hopefully something that spending the next X years in prison will give her an opportunity to do.

Background on Holly Ashcraft and other baby killers. (Area 417 also covering the Ascraft case with mutiple posts)

UPDATE: June 2007 and more legal wrangling and more inane positioning from Geragos.

technorati: holly ashcraft safe surrender infanticide.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 31st, 2005 at 8:20 am by Insider and is filed under Big Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.