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Two Abortion Doctors Charged With Murder

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.
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Wow, that's really splitting hairs. Sure, full term is 38 weeks, but does anyone doubt the viability of a 36 week fetus?
 
Anyone go and read the rest of the reports?

- The two doctors took at least fifty patients across state lines after beginning abortion procedures in order to complete them in a state with more lenient laws - specifically, late-term abortions are supposed to be performed, in most states, in a hospital. Maryland allows them to be performed in a doctor's office.
- Maryland has a fetal homicide law.
- The doctors drove her to the emergency room and refused to give their names.
- The investigation into these doctors has been going on for sixteen months.
- The doctors' licenses have been suspended in multiple states.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...homicide-law/2011/12/30/gIQAFkIURP_story.html
 
RemieV said:
Anyone go and read the rest of the reports?

- The two doctors took at least fifty patients across state lines after beginning abortion procedures in order to complete them in a state with more lenient laws - specifically, late-term abortions are supposed to be performed, in most states, in a hospital. Maryland allows them to be performed in a doctor's office.
- Maryland has a fetal homicide law.
- The doctors drove her to the emergency room and refused to give their names.
- The investigation into these doctors has been going on for sixteen months.
- The doctors' licenses have been suspended in multiple states.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...homicide-law/2011/12/30/gIQAFkIURP_story.html
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Doctors acting like this make it harder for women to find legitimate abortion services. :mad:
 
ponderingturtle said:
Depends on the fetus.
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depending on how police determined the age of the fetus, it could have been considerably younger and still met the criteria for possibly being as old as 36 weeks. The Ballard score used to determine gestational age on a live infant (the only ones that I've personally done.) aren't going to work on a frozen fetus. It measures lots of things and is pretty accurate, but at least half that chart is things like range of motion, body posture, muscular development, things a fetus in a freezer can't do. That leaves measurements and weight. As an example using weight, a normally developed (between tenth and nintieth percentile) 36 week fetus should weigh between 2235 and 3291 grams. Working this backwards is less useful. Say you find a fetus in the fridge that weighs 2235 grams. It's perfectly accurate to say that that fetus is potentially 36 weeks, assuming normal development. It could just as easily be a 32 week fetus, where the normal range is 1621 to 2285. The ranges overlap quite a bit. If you can't safely assume normal weight range, then they overlap even more. Big people have big babies, and americans are nothing if not big people.

The various measurement methods give ranges for each week too and those ranges overlap quite a bit as well. This is the sort of thing that requires someone to look at several different ways of measuring, which all give a range, hope those measurements line up, and make an expert judgement, which still represents a range. It's not in the interest of the prosecution here to determine the lowest possible age, just that a crime MAY have taken place, in that the oldest fetus in the freezer was potentially too old to abort.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Depending on conditions and response times, loading the patient and driving to the ED might be better than waiting for an ambulance. If you say have a 3 minute drive to the ED but a 10 minute wait for the ambulance it is not always a good idea to wait.
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This is a judgment call. Without knowing how far away that 'nearby' hospital was, and what the local EMS looked like, it's hard to tell if it was a good decision or not. I'd tend to view their decision more favorably if they'd given their names and taken responsibility for their patient, but I don't think this is what they're being charged with.
 
Andrew Wiggin said:
An appeal to emotion is an illegitimate and dishonest debating tactic. Thanks for making sure you've got plenty of contrast between you and me.
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No.... you got it wrong. I was pointing out your fallacy by using the opposite fallacy. So it was you that was using an illegitimate debating tactic.
 
gnome said:
Maybe I misunderstood what happened. Were they performing a procedure that was illegal under this law to begin with, or are they charged because something went wrong and it was their fault?
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Hard to say, persecutorial discretion can be rather high. So often a case is started and the public does not know the evidentiary details. A grand jury only has to agree that there is evidence a crime was committed. So a prosecutor can start weak cases. Hard to say at this point.

A patient was brought to the ER after their uterus and bowel was perforated. After this visit the police investigated the clinic, the prosecuting attorney feels that the evidence indicates that abortions were preformed that fall without outside the legal scope of the law.

If the case goes to trial it will depend on expert testimony to determine the age of the fetuses in question, at the time they appear to have been aborted. Then there will be procedural issues, was the abortion preformed in a legal manner (regards the threat to the life of the mother) and if there were still births was the documentation of that followed.
 
RemieV said:
Anyone go and read the rest of the reports?

- The two doctors took at least fifty patients across state lines after beginning abortion procedures in order to complete them in a state with more lenient laws - specifically, late-term abortions are supposed to be performed, in most states, in a hospital. Maryland allows them to be performed in a doctor's office.
- Maryland has a fetal homicide law.
- The doctors drove her to the emergency room and refused to give their names.
- The investigation into these doctors has been going on for sixteen months.
- The doctors' licenses have been suspended in multiple states.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...homicide-law/2011/12/30/gIQAFkIURP_story.html
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Thanks, the loss of privileges does not look good.
 
The Nimble Pianist said:
Actually, I take that back.

If you know that what you've done is murder someone, then it would make sense that you'd keep the body, for nothing else but evidence's sake. Legitimate abortions don't result in the fetus being kept in a freezer.
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Something seems weird about this bit to me.

Sorry for the disturbing train of thought , but...

If you did this, why on earth wouldn't you destroy the evidence? I mean i can think of reasons, the person just being a sick **** being one of them, or insane, and wanting to keep them for some odd purpose, but if these guys were providing abortions on the fly and off the books, it would seem to me they would be somewhat concerned about getting found out. And a freezer full of dead babies would be a bit of a clue in regards to this. And i mean, all dead baby jokes aside, how hard would it have been for the doctors to destroy them?

Something just seems up with this, in my opinion either the doctor in question is evil and stunningly stupid or lazy. Or this is a case of he possibly did some illegal things, and maybe had a legitimate reason to have the fetus , and it is getting promoted as them finding a bunch of frozen babies.

I just have trouble believing someone who is in sound mental health ( albeit evil, no question.) , let alone someone with the brains to go through medical school would make such a giant glaring error if they were doing something sketchy. And if they were evil enough to do this, i can't wrap my brain around how they wouldn't be callous enough to just do any number of things to get rid of the bodies.
 
sadhatter said:
Something seems weird about this bit to me.

Sorry for the disturbing train of thought , but...

If you did this, why on earth wouldn't you destroy the evidence? I mean i can think of reasons, the person just being a sick **** being one of them, or insane, and wanting to keep them for some odd purpose, but if these guys were providing abortions on the fly and off the books, it would seem to me they would be somewhat concerned about getting found out. And a freezer full of dead babies would be a bit of a clue in regards to this. And i mean, all dead baby jokes aside, how hard would it have been for the doctors to destroy them?

Something just seems up with this, in my opinion either the doctor in question is evil and stunningly stupid or lazy. Or this is a case of he possibly did some illegal things, and maybe had a legitimate reason to have the fetus , and it is getting promoted as them finding a bunch of frozen babies.

I just have trouble believing someone who is in sound mental health ( albeit evil, no question.) , let alone someone with the brains to go through medical school would make such a giant glaring error if they were doing something sketchy. And if they were evil enough to do this, i can't wrap my brain around how they wouldn't be callous enough to just do any number of things to get rid of the bodies.
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To be fair, getting rid of dozens of dead fetus bodies without getting caught wouldn't be the easiest thing in the world. Most people can't get rid of one.

-edit-

Oh, and obviously they were under investigation already. With the police watching already, it would be exceptionally difficult to get rid of a freezer full of fetuses.
 
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dirtywick said:
To be fair, getting rid of dozens of dead fetus bodies without getting caught wouldn't be the easiest thing in the world. Most people can't get rid of one.

-edit-

Oh, and obviously they were under investigation already. With the police watching already, it would be exceptionally difficult to get rid of a freezer full of fetuses.
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You seem to be running under the assumption that they would have had to do this after they were caught, which is not the case. If they had freezers full that indicates a long time, time in which they could have disposed of the fetus in any number of disturbing but effective ways. An adult human, kinda hard, but something that sized, for one with no qualms about killing a child, finding a way to make it disappear doesn't exactly seem like the hardest thing on earth. Especially when one has access to all kinds of medical tools, in addition to the reams of daily implements that could be used for the purpose.
 
Caper said:
No.... you got it wrong. I was pointing out your fallacy by using the opposite fallacy. So it was you that was using an illegitimate debating tactic.
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Can you give the post numbers? I can't see any example of Andrew Wiggin's using an appeal to emotion to which you were responding.
 
If you focus on the fetus/fetuses, you don't have enough information, by my read.

The docs are trouble, no doubt. They deserve full scrutiny/review/investigation - but I'm not sure I'd go above the level of medical malpractice for a few reasons. If they are doing an awful job - their first "victim" is the women.

A ruptured uterus? Where is the outrage for the woman who may no longer bear children? Or was she beneath consideration because of your assumptions? What was the circumstances of the pregnancy? What prompted the choice of *this* practice? How did the story get to that point? Or for any of the frozen fetuses? Stillbirth? Controlling partners or families (no birth control, morning after pill or early term abortion because we don't believe in that)? What are the stats on relationship violence and pregnancy? Biological fathers insisting that the pregnancy be terminated? Economic circumstances? Addiction?

We don't know the facts of the cases coming forward. I had a friend who had two easy pregnancies and deliveries and decided to go with a midwife and birth center for her third delivery. No sonograms, no extra medical anything - and educated woman with the support of her husband (an engineer). Upon labor, there were complications related to the infant, NO OB WANTED TO STEP UP, she was rushed to the ER, her daughter wasn't breathing when delivered, had a birth defect that would've been addressed if known, and the child died after being on a heart-lung machine for a few weeks. Did she and her husband "murder" the baby with any of these acts? No. She thought a woman who wanted a routine abortion would have gotten better (OB) medical attention than she did at the time the birth center was reaching out for affiliated OBs. She was upper-middle-class, had insurance and had financial and social resources - and played the odds based on the assumption that all of her births would be the same. She and her husband did not sue. They grieved, wove it into their family experience and lived on.

We jump to the same conclusions. Everything is like the births and babies we know. It's unlikely that individual medical information will be publicly posted. And before home-birthing comes up - we don't want cabbies refusing very pregnant women a ride to the hospital because it's illegal to give birth outside of a hospital (hyperbole)

I'm more worried that this practice is maiming and injuring vulnerable women. One of their sites is College Park. I can't imagine there is anything easy about an abortion. The women who went through a tough enough medical procedure in Elkton will likely have to rehash their circumstances and trauma because of crappy doctors.
 
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ANTPogo said:
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.
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Mycroft said:
Wow, that's really splitting hairs. Sure, full term is 38 weeks, but does anyone doubt the viability of a 36 week fetus?
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Guys (and I think I'm using the term on purpose), I've just checked out four different websites, all are agreed that a full term pregnancy is all of 40 weeks in length.

A 36 week pregnancy is premature by roughly a month. It is certainly viable, thanks to modern medicine, but likely will have to start out with time in the ICU. "Premature" is defined as less than 37 weeks.
 
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