Word: edelin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...doctor, Kenneth Edelin, 36, has spent his career at Boston City Hospital attempting to preserve and prolong lives. Last week he was convicted of taking one. After seven hours of deliberation, a superior court jury of nine men and three women in Boston found him guilty of manslaughter in the death of a fetus that he had aborted. As a result of the verdict, the popular obstetrician faces a prison sentence of up to 20 years. If the decision is upheld on appeal and if it is accepted as valid precedent by other courts, many women around the country will...
WHAT IS MOST striking about Giminez-Jimeno's testimony, in retrospect is that it agreed in its essentials with Edelin's own version of events: Edelin did, after all, perform an abortion with the intention of producing a dead fetus. The dramatic power of Giminez-Jimeno's testimony obscured the fact that he was accusing the defendant of something already stipulated. Some of the horror of that testimony was inherent in the nature of abortion...
...inseparability of the prosecution's argument from the gut issue of abortion was highlighted by the testimony of William Mecklenburg a Minneapolis obstetrician associated with the right-to-life movement. Mecklenburg attacked Edelin for what he called bad medical practice in the hysterotomy operation because the procedure is "extremely dangerous" to the unborn child. But abortion is meant to be dangerous-to-unborn children. Mecklenburg's testimony underscored something that became clearer and clearer as the trial went on: that the Commonwealth's case rested on a moral presumption that was not part of the law, the presumption that abortion...
...juror told reporters that "we all agreed the abortion was perfectly legal. It was negligence. I don't think he did a thorough job examining the fetus for signs of life once it was removed." What that juror was saying was that Edelin was convicted on the bare possibility that a legal victim of manslaughter--a living human being--existed after what McGuire ruled was a legal abortion. The law requires a reasonable certainty...
...Judge McGuire, and the testimony of his only eye witness was discredited by the defense. But, for jurors who believed the evidence of their eyes, that a baby had lived and been killed, Giminez-Jimeno's testimony was irrefutable in its essence. The defense could not deny that Edelin had deliberately caused the death of what the jurors saw in that photograph. And it may be that the defense never succeeded in removing from their minds that first, vivid picture of Edelin as a ruthless, cold-blooded abortionist, standing motionless over a dying child...