Steven Tyler, leader of the megaband Aerosmith since the '70s, is now the star judge of "American Idol"; Tyler's new memoir is No. 2 on The New York Times' best-seller list.

From the distance of 40 years, Tyler remembers and writes in his memoir about the abortion he caused a 16-year-old girl: "You go to the doctor and they put the needle in her belly and they squeeze the stuff in and you watch. And it comes out dead. I was pretty devastated. In my mind, I'm going, Jesus, what have I done?'

Years later, when Tyler and his then-wife were expecting their first child together, "I thought we'd give birth to a six-headed cow because of what I'd done with other women. The real-life guilt was very traumatic for me. Still hurts."

The pro-life community has been very gentle and compassionate with Tyler's confessions.

Even the mother of his aborted child, Julia Holcomb, who last week broke 36 years of silence to tell her side of the story to LifeSite News, sounded remarkably gentle and forgiving toward the rock star.

Well, I'm not.

She was 16; he was 26. She was traumatized by the loss via divorce and addiction of her father and her stepfather, followed by the loss of her grandfather and her brother to a car accident. The latter event seemed to send her churchgoing, loving, schoolteacher mother into a tailspin.

Julia ended up provocatively dressed at an Aerosmith concert in Portland, Ore. Tyler took her for his bedmate, and then persuaded her mom to make him Julia's legal guardian so that (he claimed) he could enroll Julia in school back in Boston. Tyler begged Julia to have his baby, and when she got pregnant, took her home to meet his family, who did not approve. Later, he stopped financially supporting Julia, and pressured her into having an abortion while she was in the hospital recovering from a fire that burned down his apartment.

She was five months pregnant. From Julia's account, it sounds like she had a saline abortion, which induces labor prematurely. The baby was born alive and died alone and neglected.