When I Google “Caylee Anthony,” almost 250,000 results come up.

The first is a story about the ongoing search in a wooded area where a child’s skull was found last week. Thousands of related articles are just a click away: Ones speculating whether the remains found are those of the missing toddler, ones detailing the investigation that began after she was reported missing last summer, ones about the murder charge dealt to her mother in October.

Beneath the news articles is a link to www.helpfindcaylee.com, which opens to a page that gives a description of Caylee: She is 3. She has shoulder-length, light brown hair and dark hazel eyes and a birth mark on her left shoulder.

Caylee has her own Wikipedia page. She has more than 50 YouTube videos. She has the attention of the entire nation – because it is, after all, a horrible thing when a child disappears and evidence indicates she might not be found alive.

But as much as her case warrants a reaction like this, it also illuminates what seems to me a gigantic disparity.

There are, after all, a million Caylees every year – in the United States alone – who no one searches for. No one writes news stories or creates Web sites about them. No one cries murder or puts their mothers in prison. I know the abortion debate sounds a lot like a broken record at this point, but as much as I’ve read and written about it – as much as I’ve talked to people on both sides – what never fails to get to me is this inconsistency.

The reason I see it as an inconsistency, of course, is that I don’t see the differences between a child who has been born and one who hasn’t as significant enough to warrant valuing the life of one but not the other. They’ve both had their own DNA – unique genetic material proving they’re not just appendages of their mothers – from the moment of conception. Maybe this is why, I’ve found, people find it pretty impossible to determine exactly when a human being begins, if not at conception – which in turn causes abortion supporters to avoid the question by making “reproductive freedom” the core issue, even though logically, any freedom that allows for taking an innocent human life has gone too far.

We can all see this clearly in Caylee’s case. I wonder, though, how many see that her story happens by the thousands every day.