I'm not so sure she is all that deserving of sympathy.
USC Student Was Focus of '04 Baby Investigation
L.A. Times - Oct 15, 2005
A 21-year-old USC student charged with her baby's abandonment and death this week also was investigated last year after she arrived at a hospital in downtown Los Angeles appearing to have just given birth but without a baby, according to law enforcement sources close to the case. In that April 2004 investigation, Holly Ashcraft eventually told authorities that the child had been stillborn and that she had disposed of its body on her own, the sources said.
[snip]
The sources and Ashcraft's attorney emphasized that she was never arrested or charged in connection with the incident in 2004.
[snip]
Why didn't the authorities investigate instead of taking her word for it? It sounds like she had murdered two babies within two years- with no one realizing that she was pregnant either time.
Uh oh. I didn't know that. It still doesn't strike me as the kind of thing a cold-blooded, malevolent killer would do, but if she has managed to kill TWO babies, then she strikes me as very likely someone with very deep drug or mental problems or some sort of affectless personality unable to distinguish between right and wrong.
It's not unknown for young women in these times to have multiple abortions because they like sex and don't give a damn about the children that sex produces, but to deliver children and let them die, not once but twice, suggests a really depraved or pathological person.