Word: dr
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell -son of the late famous pediatrician Dr. Arnold Gesell-declared unconstitutional a 68-year-old Washington law that made it a crime for any doctor to perform an abortion except when "necessary for the preservation of the mother's life or health." Judge Gesell called on Congress to write "a far more scientific and appropriate statute" for the District of Columbia. And he made it clear that the capital's only public hospital must promptly liberalize its policy on therapeutic abortions so that the operations will be as available to the poor...
Presumed Guilty. In his decision, Gesell threw out an indictment against Dr. Milan Vuitch, who had been accused under the old statute of an illegal abortion. Gesell ruled that the law was too vague; he pointed out, for example, that it did not make clear whether "health" was meant to include varying degrees of mental as well as physical health. Moreover, said Gesell, a doctor indicted under the statute was "presumed guilty" unless he could prove to a jury that the operation was necessary. In the companion case of a nurse's aide named Shirley Boyd who had performed...
...Dr. Vuitch estimates that more than 20,000 abortions a year are performed in the Washington area, and that only about 25% of them are done in hospitals. Many of the illegal abortions are performed on poor women by unlicensed practitioners under less than sanitary conditions. While the capital's private hospitals interpreted the old statute relatively freely to permit therapeutic abortions, the public institution-D.C. General Hospital-which mainly serves the poor, did very few such operations...
Gesell's decision is not likely to produce an immediate upsurge in abortions in Washington. Dr. Ernest Lowe, chief of gynecology and obstetrics at D.C. General Hospital, believes that the ultimate effect will be to make the surgery more readily available at a reasonable price. But Dr. Howard Donald, chief of staff at Columbia Hospital for Women, says: "I don't think that tomorrow morning we would say anyone could just request an abortion and have it done." Dr. Frank S. Bacon, head of the D.C. Medical Society, thinks most doctors will go slow on abortion until Congress...
Both Columbia and Berkeley experienced sharp decreases in student visits to school psychiatric services during their periods of turmoil, according to Dr. Graham B. Blaine Jr. 40, chief of the psychiatric service...