On August 24, The New York Times ran a page one story about the "gruesome killing of a newborn baby," whose dismembered body was discovered in a recycling center in Storm Lake, Iowa, on May 30.

Dead babies ordinarily don't ruffle the feathers of pro-abortion editors at large, liberal newspapers. And true to form, it wasn't the discovery of the tiny corpse, which occurred nearly three before, that landed the story on the Times' front page.

The furor was caused when the county attorney, in his latest effort to solve the crime, subpoenaed hundreds of women who had pregnancy tests at the local Planned Parenthood clinic.

Jill June, the executive director of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa, characterized the subpoena as "a horrible assault to a young woman's sense of privacy."

Ms. June has crystallized for us all the blatant hypocrisy of the 'pro-choice' crowd as it seeks to protect the privacy of its clients at all cost.

This is not privacy. This is paranoia.

The real question we should be asking is this: What about the horrible assault to the young and defenseless human being's privacy that occurred here? -- a point that was not important enough to be addressed in The New York Times article, I might add.

There are thousands of abortions performed every day in this country. Each is a horrible invasion of a human being's privacy.

What makes abortion different from the murder of a newborn is only one thing: a dismembered baby discovered in a dumpster is confrontational. It provides a visceral image of an act of extreme violence, forcing us to imagine what took place.

This makes us uncomfortable -- and it should make us uncomfortable.

But there are some real stoics in newsrooms across America. They are in good company with five Justices on the nation's highest court: Breyer, Souter, Ginsburg, O'Connor, and Stevens.

Several years ago these five accomplices placed their stamp of approval on the practice of dismembering children.

In the 2000 Supreme Court case Stenberg v. Carhart, Carhart, a Nebraska abortion doctor, brought suit against the state of Nebraska, which had banned the practice known as partial birth abortion. Because the statute sought to ban one abortion method, the Supreme Court discussed several different abortion procedures. In its certiorari, the court admitted that often during second trimester abortions there exists "the potential need for instrumental dismemberment of the fetus."

Justice Scalia, writing in his dissent, noted, "The method of killing a human child -- one cannot even accurately say an entirely unborn human child -- proscribed by this statute is so horrible that the most clinical description of it evokes a shudder of revulsion."

When the Nation of Israel rejected the laws and the statutes that had originally been given to it by God, choosing instead to worship idols, the result was a rapid spiral downward into moral decay. It wasn't long before Jewish society practiced child sacrifice. In the book of Second Kings, it is recorded, "they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire."

We've been at the same point in our country for quite some time.

As a bill to ban partial birth abortions makes its way through Congress for the third time, ponder the indirect admission of the editors of The New York Times, the executive director of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa, and the majority of Supreme Court Justices, who apparently see no difference in a person dismembering a viable new born and discarding the remains in the county recycling center and a doctor performing virtually the same procedure in the sterile confines of an abortion clinic.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com. Visit our website at www.amyfound.org.