The least coldhearted option.

The tale of a newborn infant being left and safely retrieved from a Saskatoon doorstep on a very cold Saturday morning in February made newspapers and news broadcasts clear across the nation and into the United States. There was a time not so long ago when such an incident would've been regarded in most North American newsrooms as a ho-hum, happens-100-times-a-day story.

One century ago Monsignor Nelson Baker of Buffalo's Our Lady of Victory Basilica built a special home for unwed mothers and infants in upstate New York. For years young and desperately poor mothers had been abandoning their babies on the doorsteps of the Cathedral and Monsignor Baker prudently saw to it that such exigencies were more discreetly accommodated in his new facility.

As Boniface Hanley writes in his short biography of Baker, "One of the features of the home was a small bassinet, complete with pillow and blankets, that stood in the hallway just inside the unlocked outside door. Anyone could quietly open the door to the home in the middle of the night and leave a baby in the bassinet. There were no questions asked, no forms to be filled out, no one to probe into the infant's background. For a number of years the bassinet remained, quietly receiving abandoned infants."

In British novelist and screenwriter Fay Weldon's recent autobiography--saucily entitled Auto Da Fay, for all you Spanish Inquisition fans--she tells a simultaneously charming and unsettling tale about an out-of-wedlock birth in the late 1950s. Weldon is working as a copywriter at a London ad agency when a friend receives a series of mysterious letters at her flat from some woman named Chrissie, addressed to a man whom neither of them has heard of.. Chrissie lives in a small Scottish village and has had a fling with a passing stranger. Now carrying his child, she has written to the only address he gave her for help. Chrissie is already engaged to marry a local boy and simply has to find some way to disappear from her village for the duration of her pregnancy.

Herself a single mother at the time, Weldon writes to the woman, explaining that her impregnator obviously gave her a phony address and that she'll be getting no support from him. In an attempt to soften the impact of her message, Weldon invites Chrissie to get in touch with her if she can be of any help and a few weeks later Chrissie turns up, suitcase in hand, at the door of Weldon's sixth floor flat.

A London adoption agency curtly turns down Chrissie's case when she lets slip that the father was a moody type, prone to depression. This agency seems to pride itself on only placing infants with guaranteed chipper dispositions into the hands of their clients. Weldon and Chrissie tough it out and one sunny Sunday precisely six weeks after Chrissie gives birth to a baby boy she loads him into his pram, wheels him around to the nearest Catholic church where she passes him off to a priest, and promptly heads back to Scotland.

Weldon goes round to the church a couple of hours later but the baby has already been passed along like some peg in a cosmic relay race. "The priest had given it to one of his parishioners," Weldon writes, "a nice lady with two children of her own, who lived in Pembrooke Square (a good address) who needed something to fill the void now that her husband had died. It was perfectly legal, he assured me; what was called a third-party adoption."

What's unsettling about all of these stories is the awful 'ready-or-not-here-I-come' randomness of conception and human regeneration. The charming part is that in all of these accounts--difficult, frightening and humiliating as the circumstances are for the women involved--babies get born and get a chance to grow up and live long lives. Life prevails. That such stories are now so rare as to be newsworthy is a troubling sign of how completely the culture of death has advanced in our age.

Over the last 40 years as abortion has been legalized in nation after nation, the social stigma of out-of-wedlock births has utterly evaporated. Charitable agencies offering assistance to young mothers have never been less judgmental about their clients' living arrangements. Adopted infants now have a far better than ordinary chance of being very well-provided for indeed. And yet adoption agencies everywhere have much longer lists of would-be parents looking for babies than babies looking for homes.

So why are there so few adoptions today? Why do the vast majority of women who unintentionally become pregnant choose to kill the budding human life within them rather than nurture it to term and set it free? Abortion has been given such a sanitized selling job that its appalling cruelty is no longer perceived by those not inclined to look very closely at the procedure. Most expectant women in uncertain circumstances now regard the extermination of human life as a less cruel and coldhearted action than giving up a baby for adoption. They see adoption as the abandonment of a human being and abortion as a quiet and invisible procedure that discreetly erases the possibility of a human life.

The only people who regularly do battle with this facile lie are the courageous campaigners who work for those controversial Show the Truth tours; standing at busy roadsides with their grisly pictures, jolting society out of its complacent sleep by showing precisely what abortion entails. And every now and again, a story like the one out of Saskatoon whiffles across the media radar as well and can work similar revelatory wonders. People's first reaction might be to wonder, "What sort of monster would abandon her child like that?" But five seconds further reflection will lead them to answer, "Someone who honours the life of another more than their own convenience."

Herman Goodden is a journalist who writes from London, Ontario.