Word: fetuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Edelin was convicted for the death of a fetus following a legal abortion he performed on October 3, 1973. Although the prosecution realized that it could not prosecute abortion, it succeeded in affirming, by the conviction, that an abortion can result in a birth, and that a doctor is responsible for the fetus during such an operation...
...baby boy" had been alive after Edelin removed it from kill it? Prosecution and defense witnesses alike had testified that Edelin's last action with respect to the fetus was to hand it to the scrub nurse. Flanagan puzzled over the issues the reporters raised, asking for suggestions from them, and offering analogies. "If you hit me in the none," he said, "and I die, isn't it still your fault?" He was appealing to common sense, and to emotion as he had throughout his summation...
...TAKE A LOOK at the picture of this subject," Flanagan told the jury in his closing arguments. "Is this just a specimen? Are you speaking about a blob, a big glob of mucus?" The crux of his summation was that the fetus Edelin killed had been an independent human begin with "the right to live in society" under the protection of its law. Flanagan told the jurors that the only difference between the fetus and "normal human beings" were it weight and its cause of death...
Edelin was sentenced to one year's probation on February 18, after his conviction for manslaughter in connection with the death of a fetus he aborted...
...five minutes Friday morning, during a one and a half hour discussion of the duties of a jury, the judge addressed these questions finally. What McGuire should have done then was to conclude that Edelin was innocent--in light of his definition of birth as the separation of the fetus from the mother and in light of the overwhelming evidence from both prosecution and defense that the fetus was dead when it was removed from the womb. McGuire did not acquit Edelin, unfortunately, but gave those definitions to the jury. Inevitably, the recollection of those five minutes from the judge...