The 21-year-old assailant, who pocketed $150 for his efforts, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to attempted felony murder. He won't be seeing sunshine for decades.

And the mother, whose name has been kept out of the papers because she's a juvenile?

She walks. According to the judge, "a woman who solicits or seeks to have another cause an abortion of her own unborn child cannot be criminally liable."

Whenever I write about abortion, I always get e-mails and letters along the lines of "Even if we could outlaw the procedure, women are still going to have them. So do you honestly want them arrested?"

In this case, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the answer is clear.

THE MOTHER committed

a crime, and should be spending time behind bars. If that child were in a crib instead of her womb, she'd be guilty of soliciting murder. But because that hapless offspring was nestled in her body, she gets a break.

The real question here: Is there any moral difference between this mother and Susan Smith, the modern-day Medea who drowned her little boys because they ruined her social life?

Fortunately, the baby survived and is living with foster parents.

But that doesn't absolve the mother. The irony here is that instead of criminalizing abortion, which so many pro-choicers seem to fear, we've gone in the opposite direction and refused to treat a crime as a crime - by defining it as an abortion.

I have no ambivalence about abortion. I take my lead from Mother Teresa, who believed that it is a profound moral evil. As the Nobel Peace Prize laureate once wrote, "The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?"

That's an opinion I don't believe our own newly minted Nobel laureate would share.

President Obama's record on the issue is clear: He opposes virtually all limits on a woman's ability to terminate her pregnancy.

But don't take my word for it. There's a comprehensive list of his accomplishments in the field at www.lifenews.com/

obamaabortion

record.html. Different strokes for different laureates, I suppose.

But regardless of where you stand on a woman's right to choose, and all that entails, I don't believe that forces us to accept or excuse the conduct of a woman who pays a man to beat her unborn child to death.

The smell of this ruling reaches from Utah all the way to Philadelphia, and should be a warning about where we might be heading in the neverending contention over abortion - which has now infiltrated the debate over health-care reform, too.

The Utah decision was foreshadowed in Congress several years ago, when legislators like Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D- N.Y., railed against the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which recognized that a federal crime against a pregnant woman created two victims, the woman and her baby.

Boxer and Maloney, along with Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and like-minded male supporters, criticized the law because they said it threatened to impinge on a woman's right to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy. And so a clause was inserted that exempted abortion.

It's understandable that supporters of abortion rights might be nervous about the possibility that pregnant women could be brought up on criminal charges. They see a slippery slope, as when pregnant drug-abusers are jailed for child endangerment (as they should be).

But have we now gotten to other side of that slope, where always giving the woman the benefit of the doubt (and of the law) can lead to situations like the one in Utah?

A teen who hires a hit man to bash in her abdomen shouldn't be treated just like a woman who makes a decision to have a D&C.

One is legal. The other should be a crime in anyone's book.

Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer.

E-mail cflowers1961@yahoo.com.