Culture Of Life 101… The Bridge Between Abortion And Euthanasia

By BRIAN CLOWES

Part 1

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 23 of The Facts of Life, “Euthanasia,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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Speaking at a conference of the Hemlock Society — an organization whose primary purpose is the legalization of death by choice — Dr. Joseph Fletcher, the “father of situation ethics” who died in 1991, reminisced about the days when both he and Margaret Sanger joined the Euthanasia Society of America, “thus linking the two [abortion and euthanasia] causes so to speak — the right to be selective about parenthood and the right to be selective about living.”
Fletcher explained, “We’ve added death control to birth control as a part of the ethos of lifestyle in our society.”
By 1970, the United States had already traveled far down the “slippery slope.” However, at that time there still existed a vast chasm between the theory, if not the practice, of abortion and euthanasia. A decade later, the euthanasiasts had succeeded in spanning this gap with several highly publicized cases of infanticide.
Technically, of course, infanticide is a form of euthanasia, and it is now being practiced in this country on a larger and larger scale. Not many people remember “Baby Doe” and “Baby Jane Doe.” These handicapped babies, with the sanction of the judicial system, were allowed to die lingering and agonizing deaths by starvation and thirst in the early 1980s.
Since then, they have been joined by tens of thousands of others. There are thousands of other babies who die lonely and painful deaths in American hospitals every year, and these murders are almost all covered up and hidden so that nobody except the killers will ever know.
Infanticide’s proponents rightly argue that there is no real difference between a third-trimester abortion and the killing of an infant soon after birth. In fact, Joseph Fletcher, one-time president emeritus of the Society for the Right to Die, referred to infanticide as “post-natal abortion.” Some test polls have even showed that one out of four Americans would support “fourth-trimester abortions.”
Many politicians, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, also have opposed the Born Alive Survivors Protection Act, which would protect babies who have survived abortion procedures from being killed by medical personnel.
Infanticide has clearly become entrenched in the darker corners of medical practice. The three most publicized early cases illustrating the “bridge” between late-term abortion and outright infanticide are the Edelin, Waddill, and Laufe infanticides, which accelerated this deadly practice.
The Edelin Infanticide. Just months after Roe v. Wade was decided, Kenneth Edelin of Boston performed an abortion on a 17-year-old girl who was 24 weeks pregnant. His saline abortion attempt failed, so he performed a hysterotomy (cesarean) abortion the next day.
He detached the placenta (cutting off blood oxygenation to the baby) and held the child inside the mother’s uterus for three minutes as he watched the clock. Satisfied that the baby was finally dead, he removed it and disposed of it. A pathologist testified that the baby had been able to take at least one breath before Edelin suffocated it.
Edelin was charged and convicted of manslaughter by a jury, but the verdict was thrown out by an appeals court on a technicality. It is significant that every major national pro-abortion group rallied to Edelin’s defense, and went so far as to pay for most of his court costs.
Additionally, pro-abortionists bombarded the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court with more than a dozen briefs, claiming that if Edelin were convicted, it would “unduly chill” late-term abortion practice.
Longtime Zero Population Growth (ZPG) activist Anne Gaylor, in her incredibly named book Abortion Is a Blessing, displayed her transparent anti-Catholic bigotry as she simpered: “That gentle Dr. Edelin ever should have found himself a defendant against a charge of manslaughter beggars belief. . . . That card-carrying, dues-paying Catholics ever should have been allowed to serve on a jury deciding a charge of abortion-related manslaughter is a travesty of justice.”
It didn’t seem to occur to Gaylor that her statement was equivalent to saying that no Jew should ever sit on a jury judging a neo-Nazi accused of committing a hate crime.
It is also significant that the higher court overrode the verdict of a jury — the expressed will of the people — in favor of expanding the abortion “right” to include infanticide.
The Waddill Infanticide. William Waddill, a late-term abortionist and member of the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians (now the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals), performed a saline abortion on 19-year-old Mary Weaver on March 2, 1977 at California’s Westminster Community Hospital.
Mary Weaver knew that she was at least 28 weeks pregnant, well into the third trimester. Her baby was healthy, and she was not a victim of rape or incest or maternal health problems, but she still wanted an abortion so she would not embarrass her father, who was principal of the high school that she had recently attended.
This is a classic example of a third-trimester abortion of a healthy and viable baby for pure convenience, a practice that pro-abortionists claim simply does not exist.
After doing the saline infusion, Waddill left the scene. Later, he phoned the hospital and talked to a nurse who informed him that a living, breathing baby had resulted from his abortion. Waddill instructed her: “Don’t do a goddamn thing for that baby.” He then returned to the hospital’s newborn nursery, where the baby had been relocated, and ordered the area cleared of all medical personnel.
He then choked Baby Girl Weaver four separate times by pushing down on her windpipe with his thumb.
Dr. Ronald Cornelson, the attending pediatrician, witnessed the entire sequence of events and subsequently brought charges against Waddill. During the trial, the prosecutor presented a taped phone conversation in which Waddill told Cornelson to “not get squirrelly and stick to the story as we discussed.” He maintained that he had merely put his hand on her throat to check her pulse.
However, the prosecutor also showed that Waddill had told several people that he had choked the baby girl to death because he feared that a lawsuit would be filed against him if the baby survived.
The mother of Baby Girl Weaver sued Waddill, claiming that she would never have gone through with the abortion if he had informed her that she might give birth to a live baby.
At Waddill’s trial, Judge James K. Turner instructed the jury to ignore the classical definition of death (cessation of all vital signs) and instead adopt a brand-new one he created on the spot — the irreversible cessation of brain function. Since the jury could not possibly see evidence on this point, it was forced to deadlock after a week of deliberation, with seven of the twelve jurors voting for acquittal. The judge had manipulated the trial so that it was impossible to convict Waddill.
Waddill concluded his post trial statements by saying, “I’m especially angry at the Catholic Church over this.”
Despite the frustrating conduct and results of the trial, at least some good came out of the Waddill infanticide case. Westminster Community Hospital immediately restricted all abortions to 12 weeks, and the Akron, Ohio, city council voted for strict limits on abortion, with much of the pro-life testimony based on the Waddill case. These limits were naturally challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and eventually led to a Supreme Court battle.
Waddill eventually stood trial a second time, and once again the jury arrived at a deadlock. He stated during this second trial that “I do not think that is human life if one must live a damaged vegetative existence. It would have been horribly cruel to the abortus as well as to the family if the abortus had been put on a respirator — it would have been a mockery of medicine. . . . Life on a respirator is not life.”
We must ask: How much “dignity” did Baby Girl Weaver have? Waddill himself destroyed her “quality of life” by scalding her tender skin off, and then pronounced her unworthy to live and choked her to death.
The Laufe Infanticide. Leonard Laufe of West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pa., specialized in late-term abortions. In 1985, a woman lied about being raped, and Laufe aborted her 32-week baby. The prostaglandin abortion resulted in the baby being born alive. The little baby began to gasp and kick, and nurse Monica Bright testified that Laufe ordered that no help be given to the child. In fact, one of the staff doctors ordered nurses to directly murder the child with a fatal injection of morphine. At least three nurses refused to kill the child. The entire episode, including close-ups of the baby gasping and kicking, was filmed for “educational purposes.”
The original birth records indicated that the little girl weighed more than three pounds and was 18 inches long. Laufe altered hospital records to read a weight of two and a half pounds and a length of only 11 inches.
Medical student John Kenney testified that Dr. Laufe’s attorney threatened his future as a doctor, promising him that if he testified in court he would never be able to get a medical license or practice in any hospital in Pennsylvania.
Laufe, now deceased, claimed that the baby was dead at birth. Despite the film of the entire hideous episode, he was acquitted of all charges.
Abortion and euthanasia are connected by more than the practice of infanticide — they are linked by the legal system and by the anti-life philosophy as well, as we shall see in the next article.