This is the aniversary of the day in 1977 that William Waddill performed a 30-week elective abortion that resulted in a live birth. Waddill strangled the infant as she lay in the NICU isolette.He beat a murder rap by getting two hung juries, whose indecisiveness hinged on an obscure legal definition of "death". Even though multiple witnesses saw the strangling, even though the pathologist confirmed that Baby W. died of "manual strangulation", each jury had at least one holdout who argued that this didn't mean Waddil had actually caused Baby W.'s "death".
Today would have been Baby W's thirtieth birthday.
2 comments:
I am very pro-choice and find this very disturbing. Pro-Choice people do not want newborn babies to be strangled. I don't think that this is a good point to use against abortion. If anything it could be used to promote safe and legal abortions- things like this are far less likely to happen in a doctors office than in an alley way.
Anon, most pre-legalization abortions took place in doctors' offices to begin with.
A lot of people see a betrayal in the way the abortion lobby wanted the laws struck down so that there could be regulation and such, then fight any regulation with tooth and nail. It's as if the only thing they objected to about the "bad old days" was that the doctor could go to jail! That was what pushed me from "mushy middle" to hardcore prolifer -- seeing abortion practitioners and lobbiests who, while not overjoyed if women were harmed, weren't bothered enough about it to want to stop it. It was the punishment for bad doctors that they clearly objected to.
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