Word: mother
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
According to the original trial judge, James P. Maguire, only proof that the fetus ever lived outside the mother's body would have legally constituted birth and subjected Edelin to a possible manslaughter conviction. But from the beginning the prosecution's case to prove a live birth rested on a confusing and contradictory welter of evidence. Both at the trial and at the appeal last April, Assistant District Attorney Newman A. Flanagan drowned his argument in emotionalism. Flanagan could not refute the overwhelming evidence that the fetus never lived outside the mother's womb, but he could shout...
...uncertain points of law been defined at the outset--had lawyers known what degree of separation from the mother constitutes birth or even what constitutes abortion--the Edelin case might never have come to court. The new majority opinion takes the first steps in forming some of these definitions. Even more importantly, the State Supreme Judicial Court must be commended for symbolically telling doctors that they needn't be frightened to perform abortions and women that they needn't be scared to ask for them...
...original charge was that the manslaughter and death occurred at a point when the fetus was still within the mother's body rather than, as the story puts it, when it "was still alive outside its mother's body." The change was to prove that Dr. Edelin acted wantonly and recklessly after a live fetus (baby) was delivered outside the mother's body...
...Judge McGuire did not instruct "that a body is only alive if it shows a steady heartbeat and respiration outside the mother's body." The Supreme Judicial Court, speaking through Justice Kaplan, stated this in substance as a standard which should have been applied in determining whether or not the fetus (baby) was born alive...
Maxine does not weep easily. Her soft auburn curls and sparkling blue eyes mask the mind of a prosecutor. She grew up in bloody Harlan County, Ky., the daughter of a union lawyer twice marked for assassination. Maxine's mother shot three men she thought were after him. One afternoon Maxine walked into her home-town Harlan Enterprise and, as she recalls, "told them I knew everything that went on in the county, and they ought to hire me." They did not. She was five years...