Word: fetuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
Homans's definition of birth is much more restrictive, insisting that the fetus must have breathed to have been born. And he contends that the fetus in the case "never drew a single breath." Judge McGuire's instructions to the jury, after the attorneys' closing arguments, will be critical in providing a definition of birth...
What Flanagan knows he must further 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...
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...