• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Two Abortion Doctors Charged With Murder

The Nimble Pianist said:
Seriously, I can't think of any reason why these bozos kept the fetuses babies in their freezers. :confused:
Click to expand...

Not really all that hard to figure out, or that irrational. Just like an amputated limb, blood, organ etc., the fetuses must be considered both part of someone and medical waste and treated accordingly. It's a matter of law, safety, and respect for something that was once part of a human. In most places that means cremation. Unless you have a huge quantity of material to go to the crematorium and can afford to hire the service to come daily, there will be times when there are fetuses that have to be stored and freezing them is a good way to store them. It keeps them from getting nasty, just like it does anything made of meat. Nothing sinister going on here.
 
Silly Green Monkey said:
Nine *lunar* months, babies gestate for ten lunar months.

To be more specific, it was an eight-month-old fetus. Not full term.
Click to expand...

Good luck getting that through human consciousness. The idea that the baby pops out exactly nine months after daddy popped in is too ingrained in human consciousness for people to actually look up the figures and realize that the average human gestation is forty weeks.

Also disregarded here is that unless mommy is very inactive sexually, and keeps unusually good records, date of conception is a guess, expected date of birth is a guess, and gestational age is based on statistical measurements.

My impression of the most likely chain of events here is that someone qualified to do the measurements checked the fetuses waiting to go to the crematorium and said of the largest one 'this one has a gestational age estimated as between x and 36 weeks'. Cops say 'so you're saying it might be 36 weeks old? That's nine months! That's not a fetus, it's a baby! Get em!'. Basically guilt by error bar and folk wisdom.
 
Last edited:
Andrew Wiggin said:
Not really all that hard to figure out, or that irrational. Just like an amputated limb, blood, organ etc., the fetuses must be considered both part of someone and medical waste and treated accordingly. It's a matter of law, safety, and respect for something that was once part of a human. In most places that means cremation. Unless you have a huge quantity of material to go to the crematorium and can afford to hire the service to come daily, there will be times when there are fetuses that have to be stored and freezing them is a good way to store them. It keeps them from getting nasty, just like it does anything made of meat. Nothing sinister going on here.
Click to expand...

Do you speak with any authority? Just curious.

In any case, I find it hard to believe that this clinic was so behind on having their trash cleared that they just so happened to have 35 late-term abortion fetuses in their freezer.
 
Andrew Wiggin said:
Not really all that hard to figure out, or that irrational. Just like an amputated limb, blood, organ etc., the fetuses must be considered both part of someone and medical waste and treated accordingly. It's a matter of law, safety, and respect for something that was once part of a human. In most places that means cremation. Unless you have a huge quantity of material to go to the crematorium and can afford to hire the service to come daily, there will be times when there are fetuses that have to be stored and freezing them is a good way to store them. It keeps them from getting nasty, just like it does anything made of meat. Nothing sinister going on here.
Click to expand...

You might be onto something here, my local vet only bring pet corpse to incineration once every few days, due to price. Random snippet of info you get when your pet dies.
 
Andrew Wiggin said:
Not really all that hard to figure out, or that irrational. Just like an amputated limb, blood, organ etc., the fetuses must be considered both part of someone and medical waste and treated accordingly. It's a matter of law, safety, and respect for something that was once part of a human. In most places that means cremation. Unless you have a huge quantity of material to go to the crematorium and can afford to hire the service to come daily, there will be times when there are fetuses that have to be stored and freezing them is a good way to store them. It keeps them from getting nasty, just like it does anything made of meat. Nothing sinister going on here.
Click to expand...

Except the dead babies in the freezer part.
 
Andrew Wiggin said:
Good luck getting that through human consciousness. The idea that the baby pops out exactly nine months after daddy popped in is too ingrained in human consciousness for people to actually look up the figures and realize that the average human gestation is forty weeks.

Also disregarded here is that unless mommy is very inactive sexually, and keeps unusually good records, date of conception is a guess, expected date of birth is a guess, and gestational age is based on statistical measurements.

My impression of the most likely chain of events here is that someone qualified to do the measurements checked the fetuses waiting to go to the crematorium and said of the largest one 'this one has a gestational age estimated as between x and 36 weeks'. Cops say 'so you're saying it might be 36 weeks old? That's nine months! That's not a fetus, it's a baby! Get em!'. Basically guilt by error bar and folk wisdom.
Click to expand...

Wherein X is something really close to 36 weeks, but very far away from 23 weeks.
 
The Nimble Pianist said:
Do you speak with any authority? Just curious.

In any case, I find it hard to believe that this clinic was so behind on having their trash cleared that they just so happened to have 35 late-term abortion fetuses in their freezer.
Click to expand...

I'm not posting an appeal to authority, especially not my own. I'd suggest you google how medical waste is disposed of, minus the emotional appeal of medical waste that happens to be a fetus. You could confirm what I've said by searching for example for how an amputated limb is disposed of.
Here, let me google that for you...

How often do you get your trash picked up, assuming you're somewhere with trash pickup? I get mine taken once a week. My grandmother lives in an apartment complex where she can take her individual trash bags to a dumpster any time she wants to. She can't lift a whole lot of weight, so she has little tiny garbage cans, and runs her little tiny bags at least once or twice a day. If she thought I had the same system it would be inexplicable to her why I'd store so much trash.

Medical waste is expensive to dispose of, and the companies that dispose of it for hospitals charge both for the pickup and by the weight picked up. Hospitals and clinics make a certain amount of waste daily, so the weight expense is fixed. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred pounds a day, seven hundred pounds a week, or 2800 pounds a month, you're going to have to budget the same amount. On the other hand, the truck can hold a lot of waste. If the hypothetical truck holds 2800 pounds of waste, why pay for daily pickup when there's freezer space in the morgue? They're not 'behind on having their trash cleared', they're between pickups.

To estimate how long they go between pickups I'd have to know how many procedures they did and what percentage of those were late term. I'd need to know a whole lot more than the article gives. To know that it's reasonable for medical waste to be stored for pickup, and to build up to amounts that would surprise someone who didn't think about it, all I have to do is walk down the hall and look in the storeroom. Sharps containers count as medical waste too, and they stack.
 
dirtywick said:
Wherein X is something really close to 36 weeks, but very far away from 23 weeks.
Click to expand...

Wherein X is something not stated, about which we are speculating. We won't hear it from the prosecution, because giving a range sounds uncertain, which makes poor press releases and undermines confidence. We won't hear it from the doctors because medical professionals don't break patient confidentiality just to avoid being tried in the court of public opinion. I can say definitively though that the methods for estimating gestational age give a range. Therefore whatever X is, it's a number smaller that 36, but a number we aren't being told.
 
Andrew Wiggin said:
Wherein X is something not stated, about which we are speculating. We won't hear it from the prosecution, because giving a range sounds uncertain, which makes poor press releases and undermines confidence. We won't hear it from the doctors because medical professionals don't break patient confidentiality just to avoid being tried in the court of public opinion. I can say definitively though that the methods for estimating gestational age give a range. Therefore whatever X is, it's a number smaller that 36, but a number we aren't being told.
Click to expand...

Well regardless... Little X had their head torn apart.... And now the doctor is going to prison.... Good.
 
Pardalis said:
The woman got through 9 months of pregnancy, the better choice was to give birth at that point.

When the child is fully formed, abortion is no longer a legitimate choice, it's murder.
Click to expand...

Even if the birth would be risky and the child would live a few short painful hours? That seems remarkably cruel to me.
 
Safe-Keeper said:
Need more info. "Abortions" may be carried out on miscarried fetuses, or on those that are not viable. But a mother just dropping into the clinic asking for an almost full-term healthy baby to be terminated? No way I'd be in support of such a procedure carried out. Especially not several times. Almost smacks of eugenics.
Click to expand...

I am with you. We definitely need more info.
 
The Nimble Pianist said:
Do you speak with any authority? Just curious.
Click to expand...

If we are talking about "abortion doctors" and an "abortion clinic" I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 35 isn't a terribly large number.

In any case, I find it hard to believe that this clinic was so behind on having their trash cleared that they just so happened to have 35 late-term abortion fetuses in their freezer.
Click to expand...

Why would they keep them, though?
If the procedures were illegal, it would probably be easier and safer to just dispose of the evidence. Somebody's bound to look into the freezer sooner or later, right?
 
Silly Green Monkey said:
Nine *lunar* months, babies gestate for ten lunar months.

To be more specific, it was an eight-month-old fetus. Not full term.
Click to expand...

Ooops, you're right. Stupid calendars.

But a 36-week-old fetus is still close enough to full term (37 weeks) that it certainly would have survived in most circumstances.
 
JJM 777 said:
How do you define "fully formed"? The human life is a constant metamorphosis from conception to grave.
Click to expand...

That's a bit of a stretch, even for a rousing game of semantics.

"Fully formed" is definable, as is "fully developed."

A fully formed fetus is recognizable as a human, and (barring birth defect), all of its limbs and organs are present in their final shapes. This has happened by the 10th week of gestation, give or take a week.

Yes, the body will continue to develop, which largely means the fetus continues to mature and to grow. And yes, this growth will continue for many years. But your hand won't continue to form fingers; your feet won't continue to form toes; you won't sprout additional lips or eyes or ears. You are fully formed at roughly 10 weeks. Now, you must develop and mature.

ETA: regarding the premise that aborting a fully-formed fetus is "murder," that's not true from the legal standpoint. Abortion is legal in most places up to 16 to 24 weeks, 24 weeks being considered the edge of viability. After 24 weeks, there are usually restrictions on abortion, though it varies from state to state.

Aborting a fully-formed 10-week-old fetus is legal, and would not be considered a "murder" according to virtually all abortion laws.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom