Word: fetuses
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...spent his career at Boston City Hospital attempting to preserve and prolong lives. Last week he was convicted of taking one. After seven hours of deliberation, a superior court jury of nine men and three women in Boston found him guilty of manslaughter in the death of a fetus that he had aborted. As a result of the verdict, the popular obstetrician faces a prison sentence of up to 20 years. If the decision is upheld on appeal and if it is accepted as valid precedent by other courts, many women around the country will be unable to obtain late...
WHAT IS MOST striking about Giminez-Jimeno's testimony, in retrospect is that it agreed in its essentials with Edelin's own version of events: Edelin did, after all, perform an abortion with the intention of producing a dead fetus. The dramatic power of Giminez-Jimeno's testimony obscured the fact that he was accusing the defendant of something already stipulated. Some of the horror of that testimony was inherent in the nature of abortion...
Flanagan avoided reconciling the testimony of his eyewitness with the testimony that the fetus breathed. He never took a position on whether or not the fetus was alive when it left the womb--or more accurately, he maintained both positions, Hedging his bets, he argued for a new definition of birth. Anti-abortion spokesmen testified that a child was born--without ever leaving womb--the moment the placenta was detached from the uterine wall, forcing the fetus to "to on its own systems...
...HARD to escape the conclusion that the Common wealth's case was built less on these tangled, rational threads than on an appeal to emotion. Since the decision, several jurors have said that the photograph of the fetus had a strong effect on them, and figured importantly in their verdict. When Homans objected to the admission of the photographs, Flanagan argued that it was central to the Commonwealth's contention that the "victim" of the abortion had been a baby, and not just a fetus. The defense never denied that a 24 week old fetus is similar in appearance...
...juror told reporters that "we all agreed the abortion was perfectly legal. It was negligence. I don't think he did a thorough job examining the fetus for signs of life once it was removed." What that juror was saying was that Edelin was convicted on the bare possibility that a legal victim of manslaughter--a living human being--existed after what McGuire ruled was a legal abortion. The law requires a reasonable certainty...