Word: edelin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...England Medical Society last week elected Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin, whose manslaughter conviction for a 1973 abortion was overturned last year by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, as its new president...
Abortion is not a subject about which people have no opinion one way or the other. As to the Meaning of Words uses no real names, but it is a documentary drama based on the 1975 Boston trial of Dr. Kenneth Edelin in which he was convicted of manslaughter for an abortion he had performed, a jury decision that was later reversed. The new play, at Stamford, Conn.'s Hartman Theater Company, marks the debut of Mark Eichman, 27. He sticks fairly closely to the reported facts. As a result, Act I, at least, verges on a classroom dissertation...
According to the original trial judge, James P. Maguire, only proof that the fetus ever lived outside the mother's body would have legally constituted birth and subjected Edelin to a possible manslaughter conviction. But from the beginning the prosecution's case to prove a live birth rested on a confusing and contradictory welter of evidence. Both at the trial and at the appeal last April, Assistant District Attorney Newman A. Flanagan drowned his argument in emotionalism. Flanagan could not refute the overwhelming evidence that the fetus never lived outside the mother's womb, but he could shout...
...rejecting Flanagan's plea, the majority opinion has thwarted an ugly attempt to limit the definition of a legal abortion. But in writing in an additional majority statement arguing that Edelin, as long as he did not cause its death, could not be held liable even had the fetus lived and then died, three of the justices have gone a step further: they have offered protection to doctors who perform abortions in the future. Justices Kaplan, Braucher and Wilkins recognized that when a 17-year-old woman entered Boston City Hospital in late September 1973 requesting an abortion, Edelin observed...
...uncertain points of law been defined at the outset--had lawyers known what degree of separation from the mother constitutes birth or even what constitutes abortion--the Edelin case might never have come to court. The new majority opinion takes the first steps in forming some of these definitions. Even more importantly, the State Supreme Judicial Court must be commended for symbolically telling doctors that they needn't be frightened to perform abortions and women that they needn't be scared to ask for them...