Dr. Kenneth Edelin Case Study

Emily Morgan
4-24-17
Applied Ethics
Dr. Gray
Dr. Kenneth Edelin Kenneth Edelin was an obstetrician who performed abortions at Boston General Hospital during the 1970`s. In one case, the doctor performed an abortion on a seventeen-year-old girl named Yvette, even though there was nothing wrong with her or the baby. The mother just simply did not want to mother a child. The exact age of the embryo was unknown, but thought to be around the twenty-second to twenty-fourth week of pregnancy. Dr. Edelin cut through the placental wall and then removed the fetus from the mother`s uterus. Dr. Edelin had many issues at stake when performing the abortion and below I will decide what would be the best decision based on the facts presented in the case
Unless you are raped, I feel like every person should be at least eighteen years old to even be considered for an abortion. An abortion is a very big decision that could affect you for the rest of your life. I knew a girl that by the age of eighteen she had already had three or four abortions. Not because she was raped or because anything bad happened to her, but because she kept getting pregnant and didn’t want to have a baby. Now at the age of twenty, she is pregnant again and has decided to keep the baby. She always talks about how the abortion affected her life negatively. Her parents did not know about the abortions until about a year ago, and they were greatly dishonored by her decisions. Her father no longer speaks to her because of what she did and took away her car, as well as stopped paying for her tuition for college. I do not agree that his actions were the smartest choice, but this is evidence supporting that an abortion not only effects your life, but also effects the people around you. He was so disappointed in her decisions, he will not even look at her. I think if she would have been older, she would have made smarter decisions. I think a decision as big as an abortion should be discussed with your parents if you are still a minor. I also believe that if you are having sex, you know the consequences of what might happen. Being unsafe is what causes
Edelin would have realized, upon removing the fetus, that something might go wrong when removing the baby, I understand that the mother has all autonomy over the baby`s life. According to the scenario, the removal of the fetus would have caused no further harm to the mother or would have not caused any more surgical techniques performed by Dr. Edelin. If the baby will no longer cause harm or suffering to the mother, then why would they have the right to decide whether the baby lives or dies. There are plenty of families in the world that would love to have a child, so they could have taken different actions that would deter from killing an innocent baby. Even if the mother could not take care of the child or wouldn’t have been able to give it the love that a baby needs, then she should have thought of other actions, considering if the doctor would have informed her that there is a change that the baby might still live outside of the mother’s