5/31/00 10:45 a.m.
All The Wrong Lessons
The solution to future baby killings: more explicit sex-ed for high schoolers.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor------------lopezk@nationalreview.com

my Grossberg, the New Jersey teen who, along with her boyfriend, Brian Peterson, killed their newborn son in November 1996, was recently released from prison early for good behavior. (Peterson was released in January.) Education Week marked the occasion by proposing a way to prevent future baby killings: more explicit sex-ed for high schoolers.

In her piece, "A Better Sexuality Education Course Might Have Helped," Susan N. Wilson of Rutgers University argues that the poor kids simply didn't know what they were doing. If only they had had easier access to condoms (sometimes Grossberg and Peterson were embarrassed to buy them). . . . If only they had known how safe abortion was (despite Peterson's willingness and ability to pay, Grossberg feared infection, and chickened out at abortion clinics twice during her pregnancy). . . . Wilson cites a new book by New Jersey Record reporter Doug Most, who covered the Grossberg-Peterson trial, as her supporting evidence.

Most's book, Always in Our Hearts — which are the words inscribed on the unnamed Grossberg-Peterson baby's headstone — is, according to the binding of this grocery-store paperback, of the "true crime" genre. At least that gets it right. Otherwise, the book presents the story of Amy and Brian as a devoted, loving couple who, it seems, had no choice but to suffocate their newborn and throw him in a Dumpster on a freezing-cold night.

After all, sex-ed never prepared them for giving birth in a roadside Comfort Inn. If only sex-ed had included a proper "Empathy Belly" — a 30-pound vest that teaches students what it's like to be pregnant — rather than the make-shift sack of flour kids at Rampapo High frequently made a joke of…. If only their parents hadn't pressured them to excel in school. … If only….

Well, you get the idea. There's just one "if only" missing: If only Grossberg and Peterson had been taught to treat all life--even an inconvenient child who would spoil the end of their high-school years--as precious, maybe it wouldn't have occurred to them simply to dispose of their newborn.

There will be more murders like the one committed by Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson as long as adults, and especially educators, treat them as indiscretions rather than heinous acts (there was another one reported just this week in New York). If only the editors of publications such as Education Week had the decency to realize it….