I hate writing about this.
In what has to be one of the most gruesome, heartbreaking stories I've read in years, 18-year-old Chloe Coplen-Anderson has been sentenced to somewhere between 35-60 years in prison for the heinous crime she perpetrated against her newborn son.
When she was just 16, Coplen-Anderson secretly gave birth to her son in her bedroom after having hid the pregnancy from her parents. She then quietly retrieved a knife from the family's kitchen, returned to her bedroom, and slit her son's throat.
From the New York Post:
Police arrived at the home after the teen's father reported that the baby wasn't breathing — telling the responding officer the child was stillborn and 'it was too late' to save him, court docs showed. The officer rushed to the teen's bedroom, where her distraught mother, who spotted 'marks' on the slain baby, said her daughter was responsible for the infant's death.
Local news reports indicated that the officer recovered the lifeless baby with a severed windpipe and multiple stab wounds in the chest. Coplen-Anderson's father later found the bloody murder weapon and turned it into the authorities.
To those with a moral compass, it seems unimaginable. In a culture that lacks one, it has become anything but.
In the trial, the teenager's defense attorney argued Coplen-Anderson had herself been abused, and that the unplanned pregnancy had come as a result of statutory rape. None of those issues mattered to the jury - at least not when it came to determining moral and legal culpability for the grotesque slaughter of an innocent baby boy.
It's fair to ask what must go haywire in the brain and conscience of a teenage girl to ever treat innocent life so callously? What synapses short-circuit or what mental malfunctions must occur for one person to treat something as fragile and precious as a newborn human being as worthless and expendable? Why do so many young people seem to place such little value on human life?
The answers are likely far simpler than we want to admit.
There is no one who fails to shudder in a sort of ghastly disgust when they hear what Coplen-Anderson did. Her parents were appalled. Her own attorney didn't attempt to downplay the horror even as he futilely attempted to explain it away. Everyone knows it was a wicked, despicable act.
Yet, it remains an inconvenient truth that had Coplen-Anderson hired a licensed abortionist with a fancier knife to butcher that same infant just hours earlier, half of our country's population would have not just defended the hit, they would have celebrated it and told her to "shout" about it pridefully.
So, why do so many young people seem to place such little value on human life? We go out of our way to teach people like Chloe Coplen-Anderson that life is nothing but a cosmic accident with no eternal purpose, that murdering infants for convenience is a moral option and constitutional right, that killing off the infirm or elderly is humane, and that suicide is justifiable as long as it's assisted by a doctor. Why didn't she value human life?
Well, for starters, we taught her not to.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
