We were struck the other day viewing the video of a woman named Keri Mazuka, 52, in Albany, New York, who was arrested for the 1997 killing of her infant son twenty-seven years after the baby’s corpse was found.

New DNA techniques led to the arrest.

Pray for her. That’s one message. Can you imagine the guilt?

The infant had been found swaddled in a blue pillowcase in a flower bed near a statute of Moses in Washington Park in Albany.

She was an unwed woman in her twenties at the time, and killed the child after giving birth in a bathtub filled with water and citing the umbilical cord. She admitted hearing the child and feeling his breath before taking the boy (whom police named “Moses”) to a park and dumping him there on the pillow case she then set afire.

Yes, heartless.

A medical examiner determined that the baby, who weighed nine pounds and three ounces, had been born alive and healthy, and was less than twelve hours old when it died.

A horror, to be sure. Keri now has two other, grown children but faced a twenty-five year sentence on the charge of second-degree murder and concealment of a crime.

There are those who might wonder why it wasn’t first-degree murder. The answer might be because New York is a pretty liberal state. Maybe it was a matter of mercy, which one can understand: she was a mixed-up young woman who turned desperate (not to excuse it whatsoever).

But this not the larger issue.

The larger question: If a woman can do a manslaughter sentence for killing a newly born baby, what about the doctors and nurses and patients who have late-term abortions or the cases–much more to the point–of babies who survive such gruesome abortions but are left on cold stainless-steel hospital carts to die?

What, pray tell, is the difference?

Or is the answer simply that we currently live in a schizophrenic culture?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported at least 143 babies were born alive after an abortion attempt between 2003 and 2014, based on data from states that provided the information and the actual number is admittedly far higher.

Internationally, a study of second-trimester abortions in Quebec, Canada, between 1989 and 2021 found that 11.2 percent led to a live birth, though this risk was significantly reduced by the use of feticidal injection.

Canada reported 766 babies born alive during an abortion between 2013 and 2018.

It is illegal in all fifty states to intentionally kill an infant who is born alive, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. But is it enforced, and if so, how so?

Tony Perkins, president of the anti-abortion rights Family Research Council, wrote, “In twelve states, children born alive after a failed abortion have no legal protection, and in three more states children born alive after an abortion had legal rights that governors–like Tim Walz–repealed.”

One nurse, Jill Stanek of Christ Hospital, Oak Lawn, Illinois, personally held a baby she described as struggling to breathe for over 45 minutes until death.

And get back to late-term abortions: this is barbaric and equally a homicide.

The word “evil” more aptly describes such medical “procedures.” Remarkable it is that the administering medical personnel can sleep at night.

Excuse the harshness, but any sleep they get should be in a cell next to Mazzuca.

As for the child, a detective who waged a years-long crusade to find the killer noted that the morning of the discovery, the sun was shining and “there was no escaping the beauty of the flowers that were in bloom. Those same flowers surrounded the body of a baby who never had a chance.”

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