Word: fetus
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...witness (Theodore Sorel) testifies that the defendant, Dr. Winston Gerrard (Earle Hyman), held the aborted fetus inside the patient's uterus and counted off three minutes by the operating-room clock. In a devastating counterstroke, the defense attorney proves that the doctor could not have seen the clock-it had been removed for repairs...
...three would-be mothers and the heroic efforts of doctors to save their endangered babies. Interspersed in their stories are sequences tracing the baby's development from the moment of its creation and the division of its first few cells through its amazingly rapid growth into a full fetus and finally to its emergence from the womb. Even in the earliest stages of pregnancy, the embryo is amazingly babylike. By the ninth week the fetus is kicking and wiggling, though it is so small-only a few inches long-that its mother cannot feel any movements...
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...
...rejecting Flanagan's plea, the majority opinion has thwarted an ugly attempt to limit the definition of a legal abortion. But in writing in an additional majority statement arguing that Edelin, as long as he did not cause its death, could not be held liable even had the fetus lived and then died, three of the justices have gone a step further: they have offered protection to doctors who perform abortions in the future. Justices Kaplan, Braucher and Wilkins recognized that when a 17-year-old woman entered Boston City Hospital in late September 1973 requesting an abortion, Edelin observed...
...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...