Word: edelin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Massachusetts anti-abortionists yesterday criticized the decision of the Boston University (B.U.) school of Medicine to make Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin chairman of its department of obstetrics and gynecology...
...Edelin was indicted for manslaughter in April 1974 after allegedly failing to save the life of a fetus that had survived a saline abortion he had performed. After a trial that achieved nationwide publicity, a jury of nine men and three women convicted him of the charge in February...
...Baby in the Bottle is not merely the definitive account of this celebrated case. It is a thoughtful examination of the complexities and contradictions that cannot be argued or litigated away. As Nolen explains, Edelin was never on trial for performing the operation itself. The abortion, performed during the "open season" after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 decision striking down old statutes and before the Massachusetts legislature's adoption of new laws in 1974, was demonstrably legal. Edelin was accused of causing death. Testimony before the grand jury that handed up the indictment, and during the trial...
Nolen, who recognizes that the object of an abortion is to end a pregnancy rather than deliver a live fetus, understands the jury's action. "Life is life," he writes, "and as a doctor, I believe Edelin could and should have worked to sustain that brief life." Nolen believes that Ede lin was guilty of manslaughter. But he admits that he could not have voted to convict. There was, he insists, reasonable doubt as to the baby's ever having been alive outside the uterus, and the doctor should have been given the benefit of this doubt. Says...
...Edelin's conviction was overturned on appeal. But the issue it raised roils on. As Nolen observes, a growing number of Americans now acknowledge, not without reservations, the right of women to end unwanted pregnancies legally and safely. Yet even advocates of abortion are concerned about the rights of those fetuses that somehow survive lateterm abortions and emerge unwanted but alive. It is Nolen's view that "the step from liberal abortion to euthanasia is a perfectly logical one." That, he argues, is a step no society can take without risking its own survival...