Word: fetus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Curtis said Edelin did not wait motionless with his hand inside the uterus as Gimenez-Jimeno testified, but instead had trouble removing the fetus and asked for another doctor's opinion...
...October 3, 1973, Edelin stood over the patient and, with his eyes fixed on the operating room clock, held his left hand motionless within her open womb for a period of between three and five minutes. And that only when he was satisfied it was dead, Edelin extracted the fetus. And that this fetus had for a brief period been alive, and had even breathed, and that this fetus was "viable" and could have survived on his own outside the woman who had requested the abortion. But, through the actions of Kenneth Edelin, this "male child" died of anoxia...
...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...
...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 ultimately yielded a male fetus with no signs either...
...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, it is not necessary even that "the subject" must have breathed--let alone been removed from the body...