Word: edelin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...equally painful for women. You may know that some man means well, but he just can't seem to make that vital connection between theory and practice. A few months ago, one of the most sexist men I know turned to me and said that because of the Edelin abortion trial, his eyes had suddenly been opened to all the sexism around him--but apparently he remained blind to his own because as far as I could tell he didn't change a bit. I hadn't really expected him to, but a few weeks later another man told...
...assistant district attorney's forensic legerdemain neatly circumvented the Supreme Court's landmark decision by prosecuting a doctor for an abortion without saying as much. The conviction, returned by a largely-Catholic jury, has, in turn, successfully intimidated obstetricians from performing second trimester abortions, especially those of the kind Edelin executed...
...FEBRUARY a Boston jury convicted a City Hospital obstetrician of manslaughter for the death of a fetus. Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin had aborted the fetus during an October 3, 1973, operation on a 17-year-old pregnant woman. Abortion, however, was not the issue, according to the prosecution. Newman A. Flanagan, the prosecutor, argued that the special nature of the operation produced, for a least one split second, a live birth, and that the subsequent death of the "baby" constituted an act of manslaughter...
Flanagan knew full well that abortion was protected by a 1973 Supreme Court ruling, so he redefined abortion as a process that can result in birth. Under such a definition, Edelin's crime occurred not in the course of an abortion, but after that abortion was over, when the fetus was no longer a fetus, but a human being...
This is not the place to defend either a woman's right to determine the outcome of an unwanted pregnancy in consultation with a physician, or the right of a physician to exercise his best judgement. The Edelin decision and the continued prosecution of other City Hospital doctors are outrages to these rights. It is encouraging that Edelin is appalling the conviction, and that a state law that attempts to duplicate the effects of the decision in Rhode Island has been rejected by the courts. But it is regrettable that such a process of salvaging alienated rights ever...