Word: fetuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stood, motionless, with his and in the opened uterus for three minutes. "He was locking at the clock. Nothing else," he said. Giminez-Jimeno, and other doctors who testified for both the prosecution and the defense, agreed that such an action would have certainly caused the death of the fetus by anoxia...
...other hand, Flanagan introduced testimony that the fetus breathed, and therefore lived outside the womb--one enthusiastic witness said that microscopic examination of the fetus's lungs showed that it had "gasped for breath." The defense argued that no prosecution witness firmly established that the fetus had ever breathed, and produced witnesses who testified that it had died in the womb, without taking a breath...
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...
Flanagan avoided reconciling the testimony of his eyewitness with the testimony that the fetus breathed. He never took a position on whether or not the fetus was alive when it left the womb--or more accurately, he maintained both positions, Hedging his bets, he argued for a new definition of birth. Anti-abortion spokesmen testified that a child was born--without ever leaving womb--the moment the placenta was detached from the uterine wall, forcing the fetus to "to on its own systems...
...HARD to escape the conclusion that the Common wealth's case was built less on these tangled, rational threads than on an appeal to emotion. Since the decision, several jurors have said that the photograph of the fetus had a strong effect on them, and figured importantly in their verdict. When Homans objected to the admission of the photographs, Flanagan argued that it was central to the Commonwealth's contention that the "victim" of the abortion had been a baby, and not just a fetus. The defense never denied that a 24 week old fetus is similar in appearance...