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| Healey and her supporters celebrate as the new law is signed. |
The previous law allowed abortion after 24 weeks under two circumstances: Credible claim that the pregnancy posed a serious threat to the mother's life or health, and credible claim that the baby had been diagnosed with a potentially fatal condition. In other words, it already allowed for the justifications the new law's supporters are claiming.
The new law replaces that framework with “the professional judgment of the physician." Full stop. Under this framework, every abortion any doctor chose to perform would be legal.
The law's defenders insist that no doctor would ever perform an abortion past 24 weeks for any but the most grave and tragic reasons. I challenge that assertion based on actual cases, like this one where a doctor's "professional judgment" led to the strangling "Baby W".
Mary W., a high school student, was examined by an ob/gyn on February 22, 1977, and found to be 28 weeks pregnant. This ob/gyn counseled that Mary's pregnancy was too advanced for an abortion, and advised her to consider an adoption plan. Somehow, Mary learned that 43-year-old Waddill would be willing to do an abortion. Justifying the late abortion on the grounds of "mental health," Waddill initiated it by saline injection on March 2 at Westminster Community Hospital in California.Mary's baby, a 2 lb, 8 oz infant girl, was expelled that evening and discovered by a nurse.
The nurse clamped the cord and was about to put the baby in a bucket for transport to the pathology lab, when she noticed that the baby was moving and crying. The nurse was uncertain about how to proceed.
Another nurse suggested that regardless of any signs of life, the baby should just go into the bucket and off to the pathology lab per routine. Yet another nurse testified that she had seen the infant move but said nothing about this to avoid distressing Mary.
The first nurse summoned the nursing supervisor, who noted that the baby was pink and making sucking motions. She sent the baby to the nursery and summoned the mother's attending physician -- in this case, Waddill.
One nurse cleared the infant's throat, placed her in an isolette, and charted a heartrate of 88. A neonatal ICU nurse began providing respiratory assistance on the little girl, and asked for help performing an intubation, which is routine NICU care.
Waddill arrived and chased everybody away. Several witnesses heard Waddill instruct staff "not to do a goddam thing for the baby." An ER doctor -- who evidently had noticed that something was up and had popped in to see for himself what was going on -- saw Waddill squeeze the umbilical cord, whereupon the "child jerked its body and gasped for air."
Waddill evidently had prepared for the birth of a living baby. A tape was entered into evidence of a call from Waddill to a pediatrician, Dr. Ronald Cornelsen. In this call, Waddill told Dr. Cornelsen to come to the hospital, because the law required a pediatrician to assist when a newborn was in distress. Waddill said, "If we all tell the same story, there will be no trouble. ... So long as we stand together, no one anywhere can make any accusations anywhere. ... Do not get squirrely. Just tell them exactly as we've discussed. Just say you went in, there was no heartbeat and you left."
Dr. Cornelsen testified that when he arrived at the hospital the infant, a baby of about 31 weeks gestation, was breathing and had a heart rate of 60-70. There were bruises on her neck. Dr. Cornelsen said that Waddill told him, "Sorry to get you in this mess. We had a baby that came out live from a saline abortion, and it can't live!" Dr. Cornelsen testified that he saw Waddill press on the infant's neck, saying, "I can't find the goddam trachea," and "This baby won't stop breathing."
Dr. Cornelsen testified, "I said, 'Why not just leave the baby alone?' He said, 'This baby can't live or it will be the biggest mess you ever saw.'" Cornelsen said that Waddill told him that the baby would have suffered brain damage during the abortion and that if the baby lived, "There would be big lawsuits and it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the baby."
Waddill requested potassium chloride for an injection to stop the baby's heart, but Dr. Cornelsen wouldn't let the nurse get it. Waddill then suggested trying an injection of insulin. Dr. Cornelsen said Waddill also asked for a bucket so he could drown the baby.
Waddill later claimed that he hadn't strangled the baby, that she had died of natural causes before he even arrived at the hospital to deal with the delivery. He asserted that all of his actions were done in the best interests of the mother and the baby. However, having died in the nursery rather than in the abortion ward meant that rather than going into the medical waste incinerator, Mary's baby was afforded an autopsy, which backed what the witnesses said.
A pathologist examined the baby's lungs and concluded that she'd been alive for at least 30 minutes. Though saline causes capillaries to break down and thus gives the aborted baby a mottled, bruised look, the neck trauma was "consistent with manual pressure, and inconsistent with saline." The pathologist also testified that only the infant's placenta and small bowel seemed to have been "significantly affected by the saline," meaning that Mary's baby had not suffered fatal injury from exposure to the saline in-utero. Had the nurses in the NICU been allowed to proceed, Mary's baby would almost certainly have lived, and perhaps even thrived like Giana Jessen, who would be born under similar circumstances in Los Angeles just one month later. The autopsy found the cause of the baby's death to have been "manual strangulation." Her gestational age was determined to have been 29 to 31 weeks at autopsy, consistent with the observations of Dr. Cornelsen.
Before the judge in the Waddill's April, 1978 trial, Waddill's defense team argued that the jurors should be permitted to consider whether or not the baby, had she lived, would have suffered brain damage from the abortion. The judge agreed to allow this line of defense. The judge also instructed the jury that they could not take into account whether Mary's baby would have been disabled due to the saline and that it didn't matter if Waddill had strangled the baby or allowed her to die through lack of the same care any other infant would have received. "A child's right to medical treatment is not diminished by what the quality of the child's future life may be."
All told, over 13 weeks of testimony, the witnesses described three unsuccessful attempts by Waddill to strangle Mary's baby, and the fourth, successful, attempt. During deliberations, though, the jury asked for clarification of a procedural point. A few phone calls to clarify the point led to the discovery by the attorneys and judge that there was a definition of "death" in the California health and safety code that had not been brought into the case yet. This definition? "Total and irreversible cessation of brain function."
A doctor testifying on Waddill's behalf had argued that Waddill had been right to forbid the nurses to provide care to the baby. "We call these babies monsters. These monsters are born and they continue to live for a while.... They finally die, of course. They breathe and they have a heartbeat, but there is no brain function." The jurors became hopelessly deadlocked over whether Waddill's actions, though clearly causing what laymen would consider the "death" of the baby, had stopped the baby's "brain function" because it had never been established that the baby had any brain function in the first place.
Two jurors asserted that they had to give Waddill the benefit of the doubt. Nobody had proven that the mewling, squirming, gasping infant in the hospital nursery had actually had any brain function, and therefore it could not be proven that Waddill had caused any brain function to cease by strangling her. Those jurors held firm against the two jurors who argued in favor of common sense. The remaining jurors just wanted the thirteen-day ordeal to end.
The judge had to declare a mistrial. A second jury was also deadlocked, and the charges against Waddill were eventually dismissed.
Mary later sued Waddill, saying that he'd never told her that her baby might been born alive, and that she never would have consented to the abortion had she known this was possible. She said that Waddill "willfully and unlawfully used force and violence upon the person of the baby [W.] ... causing the decedent baby [W.] to die."
Waddill continued to perform abortions in California, and as of 2000 was working for National Abortion Federation member Family Planning Associates Medical Group, a chain where over a dozen women and girls suffered fatal abortions.
The abortion that ended in the murder of Baby W would be totally legal in Massachusetts now.
Watch "This Baby Won't Stop Breathing!" on YouTube.
Sources:
- "Doctor Pleads Strangling Innocence," Sacramento Bee, May 20, 1977
- "Doctor to Surrender in Strangulation of Baby in Hospital," Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1977
- "Doctor Arraigned in Baby's Death," Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1977
- "Jurors Told That Doctor Killed Infant," Miami Herald, January 27, 1978
- "Abortion case lawyers wrangle on moral issues," Des Moines Register, April 14, 1978
- "Abortion Death Trial Jury Out," Asbury Park Press, April 25, 1978
- "The Ordeal of a Divided Jury," Time, May 22, 1978
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Veteran pro-life investigator Kevin Sherlock asks people of good will to help him have Planned Parenthood prosecuted for profiteering from the rapes and incests of underage girls many thousands of times each year.
Sherlock has pulled the police records of hundreds of cities and has pulled the child protective services records of multiple states to prove Planned Parenthood staffers are violating mandated reporting laws designed to protect girl victims. But there is more to be done. Sherlock will make sure more and more evidence gets to federal and state prosecutors who care about protecting girls from abusers and profiteers.
If you would like to help, please click the following link:
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