Ironically, in each of the most recent "dumpster" baby cases, had the woman simply exercised her "right to choose" no one would ever have known of her child or questioned her motives. The Staten Island 13-year-old who gave birth and dumped her baby in the trash, the woman who gave birth at Logan Airport and left her child to die in a toilet and an unidentified woman who left her newborn in a hospital parking lot in Worcester, simply might have killed their unborn children legally and escaped all public notice.

Easy access to abortion, held up as a lynchpin of women's rights, was supposed to rid women of the scourge of unplanned pregnancies and put an end to unwanted babies. Yet Roe vs. Wade has failed in this regard. Giving birth and abandoning or killing one's own newborn is not the type of behavior we would expect from women who have a sense of dignity, respect and equality.

One need not search very far to penetrate the mystery of such seemingly callous behavior. Abortion carries with it the message that life is cheap, and children are only "right" under certain circumstances. Popular culture portrays sex as fundamentally necessary and inevitable. Yet, the consequences of sex are also entirely the woman's responsibility, since it is her right to choose abortion.

A recent conversation with a young woman, a few months pregnant, illustrates the terrible burden that "choice" has become for many women. Having had two children, this young woman told me she knew abortion was killing a child in her womb. Yet, she did not want "it" because "it" would interfere with a relationship that she hoped to salvage, her work, and the familial support she now had.

Carrying the child to term and giving her up for adoption seemed impossible, since she could not bear the thought of parting with the baby she would give birth to. The choice for her was clear: death of her hopes and dreams, death of a child she could not yet see, or, as she perceived it, death to herself in giving her baby up for adoption. She chose what she perceived as the least of three evils.

Research has shown this to be true: Most women who are pregnant know, at least at some level, that they are carrying a child. Yet, women in difficult pregnancies perceive themselves as facing some kind of death, either to their self-identity or to a child yet to be born. Fear, pain and self-preservation are powerful motivators and in many cases prevail as the basis for choosing the fate of one's child. But, deciding the fate of another human being, especially one's own offspring, is a terrible burden. Perhaps for some women complete secrecy and denial of the reality that she is a mother is easier than the burden of choosing to destroy the child in her womb.

Abortion is at best a dubious "right" that pits women against their children. The "dumpster baby" epidemic is simply an extension of the legal killing of a child by abortion. The difference is that in one case, the agony of the woman and horror of it all is acknowledged and shared by the public. Abortion hides the reality that dumpster babies bring to light.

Women need real choices - ones that enable them to embrace reality and affirm their dignity.