Word: edelin
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...defense argues that his particular operation was an abortion undertaken at the request of the patient, and with the understanding on Edelin's part that it would result in abortion of the fetus. Therefore, the defense cites the January 1973 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade to demonstrate that all abortions--even up to the 40th. or last week of pregnancy--were legal at the time of the operation, especially because Massachusetts had not exercised the option as outlined by that ruling of limiting the legality of abortion on a viable fetus...
...examine the complexities of the case, it is easiest to begin with these agreements. The operation for which Edelin was indicted, both sides agree, was a hysterotomy, a procedure in which the abdomen and the uterus of a pregnant women are cut open for the purposes either of abortion or delivery. During this operation. Edelin separated the placenta of the fetus from the uterine wall of the patient, thus depriving the fetus of the nutrition that sustained its pre-natal life. The defense will even concede the presence of the body, for it agrees with the prosecution that his operation...
...prosecution responds that Roe V. Wade is irrelevant here because the operation was not an abortion by definition, in spite of the intention of either the patient or Edelin. Instead, Flanagan contends, this hysterotomy operation resulted in the delivery of a live male child that was subsequently killed. He says that legal "birth" occurred in the course of that operation when Edelin separated the placenta of the fetus from the uterine wall; that after that point, the fetus was detached from the mother and living under its own systems for a period of time. In Flanagan's definition of birth...
...prove to win his case is that the fetus was viable, since this birth would mean nothing unless the fetus was old enough to have survived. If the fetus were pre-viable and would have died apart from the woman, there can be no grounds for the allegation that Edelin killed a human being. Flanagan has argued that the fetus was between 24 and 28 weeks gestational age, while Homans--holding fast on a line of arguments that is not essential to the proof of his own claims--contends that it was between 20 and 22 weeks...
However, such a strict examination of the prosecution's case implies that it would not oppose abortions in which the surgeon's contact with the fetus occurs only after it is dead--as in, say, an abortion by saline infusion--and that the prosecution of Edelin is aimed simply at abolishing abortions by hysterotomy. Still, many charge that the prosecution has a much more purposeful motive: that anti-abortion forces lie behind the indictment...