A Case Celebre

By Peter Staler

THE BABY IN THE BOTTLE by William A. Nolen, M.D. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; 253 pages; $8.95

In October 1973, Dr. Kenneth Edelin, then 35 and chief resident in the overworked, understaffed obstetrics service at Boston City Hospital, performed an abortion on a 17-year-old. The operation terminated the patient's pregnancy and, for the time being, her problems. Edelin's woes were just beginning. By spring of the following year, the doctor found himself under indictment, and in January 1975, he went on trial for manslaughter.

The case became an encapsulation of the nationwide abortion debate. Some attempted to make a martyr of Edelin, who is black. Others supported his accusers, who were, as it turned out, only public prosecutors doing what they considered a distasteful job. Few understood the controversy or viewed the personalities with objectivity. Dr. William Nolen, the Litchfield, Minn., surgeon who first won a national following with his 1970 book The Making of a Surgeon, was one of those few.

The Baby in the Bottle is not merely the definitive account of this celebrated case. It is a thoughtful examination of the complexities and contradictions that cannot be argued or litigated away. As Nolen explains, Edelin was never on trial for performing the operation itself. The abortion, performed during the "open season" after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 decision striking down old statutes and before the Massachusetts legislature's adoption of new laws in 1974, was demonstrably legal. Edelin was accused of causing death. Testimony before the grand jury that handed up the indictment, and during the trial, raised the question of whether the 20-to 24-week-old fetus might not have been legally alive after Edelin performed the hysterotomy, or "mini-caesarean section," that terminated the pregnancy. While the testimony failed to produce an answer, it did convince the jury of three women and nine men that Edelin should have done more to find out if the baby was viable and worked harder to help it live if it was.

The jury voted to convict.

Nolen, who recognizes that the object of an abortion is to end a pregnancy rather than deliver a live fetus, understands the jury's action. "Life is life," he writes, "and as a doctor, I believe Edelin could and should have worked to sustain that brief life." Nolen believes that Ede lin was guilty of manslaughter. But he admits that he could not have voted to convict. There was, he insists, reasonable doubt as to the baby's ever having been alive outside the uterus, and the doctor should have been given the benefit of this doubt. Says Nolen: "I would have voted to acquit Edelin, even though I think he was guilty."

Dr. Edelin's conviction was overturned on appeal. But the issue it raised roils on. As Nolen observes, a growing number of Americans now acknowledge, not without reservations, the right of women to end unwanted pregnancies legally and safely. Yet even advocates of abortion are concerned about the rights of those fetuses that somehow survive lateterm abortions and emerge unwanted but alive. It is Nolen's view that "the step from liberal abortion to euthanasia is a perfectly logical one." That, he argues, is a step no society can take without risking its own survival.

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