A Matter for Scientific Study and Medical Judgment: Abortion Providers, Anti-Abortion Activists, and the Debate over Abortion Procedures

In Oct. of 1973, Dr. Kenneth Edelin, then an OBGYN resident at Boston City Hospital, performed a hysterotomy, a late-term abortion akin to a C-section, on a 17-year old girl.  Shortly thereafter, the district attorney indicted Edelin for manslaughter, charging that the fetus had still been alive when Edelin removed it from the patient’s uterus.  The redefinition of birth, abortion, viability, and the fetus stood at the center of the Edelin case, was key to his conviction, and followed abortion procedures into the 21^st century. Edelin was found guilty and sentenced to one year probation – a verdict that was later overturned.

The Edelin case symbolizes the opening salvo in an attack on physicians’ ability to perform abortions according to their best professional judgment.  Starting immediately after Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion activists attacked abortion providers by focusing on aesthetic concerns surrounding abortion procedures.  If abortion providers talked about the safety and humanity of abortion, anti-abortion activists focused on the procedures’ alleged danger to women and on gruesome descriptions of fetal death.  The decision to shift the debate around abortion from abstract moral principles to aesthetic concerns was both tactically brilliant and has been central to the anti-abortionist movement.  Abortion providers were pushed into a defensive position in which it seemed no longer possible to even discuss abortion procedures after the first trimester. What began in 1973, with the indictment of Kenneth Edelin for performing a hysterotomy, reached fruition in 2007 with Gonzales v. Carhart in which the U.S. Supreme Court successfully outlawed intact D&E, an abortion procedure which had been denounced as partial birth abortion.  This paper will trace the debate surrounding abortion procedures from the Edelin case to the Carhart decision and analyze the impact which the legal cases had on abortion providers’ ability to actually perform abortion procedures.