On January 13, 1915, 23-year-old Mrs. Beulah Rehm died at Wesley Hospital after an abortion perpetrated at Dr. A.L. Blunt's Chicago practice. Blunt was held by the Coroner but the case never went to trial. He did, however, eventually end up in Leavenworth for drug dealing.
Moving forward in time to the safe, legal days of competent, compassionate abortion care, we have the case of Christin Gilbert (pictured), a 19-year-old woman with Down Syndrome pregnant through sexual abuse by an undetermined perpetrator. Christin's parents brought her to George Tiller's late-term abortion practice in Wichita, where they cared for her themselves in a motel room between visits to the facility for the various steps in achieving the death and expulsion of Christin's unborn baby. In spite of serious complications, Christin was not taken to the hospital until she stopped breathing in Tiller's clinic, under the care of that other hero doctor of legal abortion supporters, LeRoy Carhart. Clinic staff lied to 911 about Christin's condition, and when medics arrived Carhart was being so inept in his attempts at resuscitation that he was mistaken for a bystander. Christin was taken to a hospital but the damage was done and she died on January 13, 2005.
Is it possible these people were hate mongers who thought that a Down's person shouldn't be alive at all? Could they have done a "post-natal abortion" on the Down's Syndrome mom? The facts seem to suggest so. Why aren't the people who did this abortion being prosecuted for murder? If the law doesn't recognize killing the fetus as murder, killing the mother would certainly qualify as murder, even if the mother has Down's Syndrome.
ReplyDeleteCecilia, I think the fact that Christin had DS was considered reason, in the minds of ALL the staff there, to keep her from reproducing and to keep her (in their eyes) "tainted" baby from surving. But I think the quackery was routine garden-variety quackery of the sort I'd have expected from Carhart.
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