News Notes

WA State judge cleared in free speech case

Canadian woman gets settlement in abortion negligence suit

Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Douglas MacLellan ruled they should not have allowed Wanda MacPhail to drive home following an abortion March 24, 1993. He awarded MacPhail $724,547 - mostly for lost future income - along with prejudgment interest of $9,105, and $41,393 in legal costs.
In his December 23, 1997 decision, MacLellan ruled MacPhail, 37, was traumatized by the abortion and should not have been permitted to drive herself home to Boutiliers Point, 40 kilometres away.
"I find that Dr. Desrosiers and Jean Palmer breached their duty of care to the plaintiff by not ensuring that they, or some staff member, advised her not to drive," MacLellan said in the written decision.
He found MacPhail, a nurse and mother of four, didn't want to have the abortion but chose to do so largely because her husband was upset by her pregnancy.
"Later, as she drove home, I believe the intense emotional turmoil of aborting what she described as a baby, caused her to faint. This resulted in her losing control of her vehicle and letting it cross the center line of the highway and being struck by the other vehicle," MacLellan wrote.
The abortion was performed after which MacPhail said she was physically okay, but emotionally shaken. She was taken to a recovery room where she sat for 30 to 45 minutes in a "robot-like" state with no counseling or post-abortion support.
MacLellan found abortion-clinic staff also liable for Newbury's injuries, but MacPhail wasn't. He did not make a decision on damages in that case.
In light of the appeal, the court issued a partial stay on the payment order. The abortion facility staffers were to pay $5,000 per month beginning January 1 until the beginning of this month, pending the appeal outcome.

Ellen" TV show canceled

New York, NY -- Too much of the same thing - not the gay thing - led to a dwindling audience for "Ellen," the president of ABC said - but only after much pressure and a decline in advertising revenues brought about by product boycotts and letter-writing campaigns.
Robert Iger claimed the sitcom became too much for people because it explored the lead character's homosexuality every week.
"I think the audience left primarily because of sameness. Not gayness," Iger said of the recently canceled show in an interview to be broadcast tonight on the network's "Prime Time Live."
A year ago, "Ellen" made television history as the first series with an openly homosexual lead character. It drew both praise and fire for its portrayal of a woman coming to terms with her lesbianism.
But despite the denials that it was the "gayness" of the show which brought about its demise, others claim that the issue of homosexuality was central to this event.
The show was not strong even before the "coming out" episode and it only rose temporarily during those shows.
However, after the "coming out," groups like American Family Association mounted national letter-writing campaigns to local an national advertisers causing many to retreat from the show. Declining viewership only added to this problem.

FL governor nixes pro-life plate

Tallahassee, FL -- Saying it would be the first specialty license plate in Florida to promote a political message, Governor Lawton Chiles vetoed an anti-abortion tag with the message "choose life."
"It's a subject that's very controversial, divides the state," Chiles said. "And I don't think we ought to embark on that with tags."
The plate was bright yellow and carried the faces of two smiling children as well as the words "choose life." A group called Choose Life Inc. collected 10,000 signatures and paid a $30,000 fee, the two prerequisites for seeking legislative approval of a specialty tag.
The money raised by the $20 extra fee for the plate would have been distributed among private groups to help women who want to put children up for adoption. Agencies that provide abortion services would have been ineligible, Chiles noted in his veto message.
The license plate "by its very terms ... does not foster choice" by barring abortion groups from getting money.

US and Norway "used insane for Nazi-style tests"

Oslo, NORWAY -- American and Norwegian hospitals were involved in sterilization experiments on the mentally retarded using radiation over a 20-year period up to 1994.
Although most of the work was done during the Cold War, some experiments continued until as late as four years ago, according to the Oslo daily Dagbladet.
With chilling echoes of the Nazi era, the Americans and Norwegians were intent upon assessing the effects of radiation on different parts of the body and apparently had no qualms about the use of subjects who were "easy to deal with", according to Fredrik Mellbye, 81, who revealed the shocking details of the project. He is a former colleague of the then director of Norway's health services.
The State Department in Washington is seeking "clarification" of the report from its embassy in Oslo.
"An unknown number of experiments were undertaken in all secrecy at many Norwegian hospitals after the war when the nuclear threat and arms race were at their worst," the Norwegian daily reported. "The retarded and insane were used, among other things, in trials for X-ray castration, a method used by German Nazi doctors during the Second World War in the Auschwitz and Ravensbruck concentration camps."
Mellbye said hospital records would prove the tests had taken place. "I cannot remember that anyone at any time put their foot down to stop what was happening," he said. "Both authorities in the health services, psychiatrists and other doctors knew what was going on."
The revelations follow admissions by the Swedish authorities last year that 4,500 mental patients were made to undergo lobotomies in an officially sanctioned program that lasted almost 20 years. Sweden has also admitted that 60,000 women were forcibly sterilized between 1936 and 1976.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia and one Swiss canton as well as the Nazis all put the theory of selective breeding into practice in the 1920s and 1930s.
But the Swedish revelations were particularly stunning. Grounds for sterilization included "unmistakable Gypsy features, psychopathy, and vagabond life." Other grounds were specified as "displaying undesirable racial characteristics or signs of 'inferiority', poor eyesight or sexual and social deviancy."
Last year the French launched an inquiry into reports that 15,000 Frenchwomen had been illegally sterilized without their consent after being declared unfit for motherhood.
All were sterilized by state-run institutions.
Mellbye said the Norwegian experiments were carried out with the co-operation of Americans "at the highest level" and that Norwegian doctors were encouraged to seek US financial support.
Dagbladet said public investigations in America have revealed that authorities there financed about 4,000 such experiments on humans between 1944 and 1994.
After Norway was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1945, it was eager for US military and economic assistance. When the Soviet Union, which shared a border with Norway, began producing nuclear weapons in 1949 the West wanted to know more about the impact nuclear fallout had on people. Mellbye said the program was an attempt to gain basic knowledge about radiation and was neither secret nor controversial.
"It was part of the natural order of the time," he noted.

Judge orders "unsafe" abortion facility closed

Atlanta, GA -- A Fulton County judge shut down Georgia's biggest abortion facility based on state claims that Atlanta's Midtown Hospital is so filthy and badly run that lives are endangered there every day.
The Department of Human Resources says the abortion facility is "overcrowded, understaffed and dirty" and shows "a complete disregard for, or the inability to care for, the health and safety of its patients."
Superior Court Senior Judge William Alexander ordered the Ponce de Leon Avenue clinic closed while the state pursued attempts to shut it down permanently. Administrator Ignatius DeBlasio said they would appeal next week.
The state investigated for more than two years and found dozens of violations, according to the complaint it filed in Fulton Superior Court.

Among them:

Unborn children were expelled on the floor and in the commode, because of overcrowding and a lack of patient monitoring;

Equipment was not sterilized adequately;

Employees could not prove their qualifications;

Medical records were inadequate;

The facility lacked emergency policies; and

Maintenance and housekeeping failures included an opened window within feet of an operating room table, a hole in an operating room wall, dirty floors, stained ceiling tiles and peeling paint.

State investigators began finding rules violations during licensing inspections in February 1996, the complaint says. They found 17 infractions on Oct. 3, when DHR told the abortion facility it would be fined $25,000. Then, after three more visits early this year, the state issued a 60-page statement of deficiencies, revealing "a startling array of severe rule violations which have a direct adverse impact on patient care."
In further visits, abortion facility employees refused to allow inspectors to review part of its operations and to provide some records, DHR alleges. The state told the abortion facility March 9 it would revoke its permit, and returned March 14, accompanied by a warrant and sheriff's deputies, and again on April 6 in response to complaints. The state found "a continuing, shocking disregard for the welfare" of patients.
On April 21, the abortion facility sent the state its compliance plan. But a follow-up tour May 5 found continued problems, the state says.
The abortion facility performed more abortions than any facility in Georgia - 7,465 in 1996, including second trimester abortions - said DHR spokeswoman Fran Buchanan.
Mary Boyert, executive director of the Georgia Right to Life Committee, called the state's allegations frightening.
"I'm just very concerned for the women who might have abortions there and hope that there's some way to close it down immediately," she said. "It's bad enough that they're taking the life of the child, but it sounds like they're putting [women's] lives at risk, too."

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