The Mom Bomb

Sure, the headline was a grabber: "PROM MOM FREED," juxtaposed with a photograph showing her three years ago, at age 20, looking like she could be Jennifer Aniston's understudy on "Friends," but sullen, unblinking.

This is Melissa Drexler, who achieved instant immortality in some Maternal Hall of Shame by giving birth in a bathroom stall at her 1997 New Jersey high school prom , then killing the infant – her newborn child – before she returned to the dance floor.

TRENDING: Montana lawmaker follows Trump's lead, moves to designate Antifa as domestic terror group

Doubtlessly just in time to slow-dance to that anthem of insincerity, "Feelings."

I don't understand it. I don't understand women who kill their offspring. I don't understand why this ice-blooded, "unremorseful" automata wasn't adjudicated mentally ill – and why she's not being treated, at the least, for a biological imbalance.

Apparently these folks have never paged through the DSM, the Bible of psychiatric diagnosis, or even considered Intermittent Explosive Disorder.

But no, after serving a little over just three years of a 15-year sentence for aggravated manslaughter, Melissa Drexler was recently freed from prison.

Score one for her lawyer.

Despite the belief of investigators that her baby was delivered into the toilet, strangled and wrapped in trash-bags.

This was in Monmouth County, N.J., where I grew up, sufficiently fortunate not to have been dropped into the toilet, strangled and wrapped in trash-bags in my first moments of life.

Aggravated manslaughter? They've got to be kidding. I'm not a mother – nor will I ever be one. And I am determinedly pro-choice. But this sickening episode, incident, crime, disgusted me then, and still disgusts me now.

Upon her release from jail, her attorney announces she will live with her parents and, according to an AP story I saw, "may pursue a career in the fashion industry."

Tra-la-la! Designing maternity dresses?

Hello? Anybody home?

I mean, delivering your baby son in the loo on prom night – after having cramps in the car on the way over – and then killing the baby so he doesn't ruin your life, before going back out to dance, barely missing a beat – something so ghoulish and ghastly it's guaranteed to make even horror-meister Stephen King shudder and shy away from exploiting such material.

Gives new meaning to "Doing the Hustle."

Garish, grisly stuff. One deliberately cynical web-site, the Melissa Drexler Fan club, labeled her actions "post-natal abortion."

Why didn't Melissa Drexler's mother and father know she was expecting? Where were they during her pregnancy? How do today's school-kids manage to hide big bellies or bomb plots from their parents? She didn't even tell her boyfriend!

Even more surrealistically, before her sentence began three years ago, Melissa Drexler was, her father told the Asbury Park Press, "keeping busy by babysitting."

He sounds simply clueless, doesn't he?

During the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent some time around mothers at my neighbors', Anne and Arnie Arcadia, and made some observations about parenting. Instantaneously, the Arcadias, those glamorous jet-setters, had become transformed into proud, doting, babysitting grandparents when their journalist son Dov's wife, Jana, had Joshua, a beautiful little boy, six months ago. Slim and ambitious, Jana had worked in the dot-com industry but cut her job down to one day a week, so she could be with her child.

Fortunately, family economics were such that Dov and Jana could get by on one income, which certainly is rarely the case.

While Jana was at work every Friday, Anne Arcadia was delighted to watch the baby, traveling to Manhattan from Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, Jana was explaining to her father's cousin – a middle-aged lawyer's wife from Washington, D.C., two young sons in tow – why she preferred being with her baby all day, rather than depending on daycare.

Everybody was happy. And yet, Jana seemed to feel she needed to apologize to her father's cousin for enjoying being a stay-at-home mom.

"It's hard work," Jana said, "the hardest work I've ever done. But I love it."

Later, when I left, I whispered supportively to Jana, "Never apologize for loving motherhood enough to stay home and be with your child."

How sad: Our society is so askew, a stay-at-home mom has more explaining to do, and can seem less confident, than someone who committed infanticide. But there you go.

Let's applaud the Janas of America who choose motherhood gladly, willingly, wholeheartedly.