Support the Union

LAST SPRING, the Medical Area Employees Organizing Committee affiliated itself with District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America, in its drive to form a union for clerical and technical employees in the Medical Area. The unionizing effort has won the support of a vast majority of Medical Area workers, but Harvard has opposed the formation of the union, contending that the Medical Area is an "inappropriate bargaining unit" under the National Labor Relations Act. National Labor Relations Board hearings were held to determine whether Medical Area Employees share "a separate community of interest."

When the board decides if a union-forming election should be held, it should dismiss Harvard's protests, and allow Medical Area employees their own collective bargaining unit. District 65's lawyers have shown that the Medical Area is very much a separate entity within the larger University. And Harvard's claim that the union should include workers throughout the University is little more than an attempt to head off a union altogether. The organizing drive in Cambridge is far less advanced than that at the Medical Area, and a decision by the NLRB against a Medical Area union would be a serious blow to the District 65's already limited efforts in Cambridge.

The Edelin Case

IN MID-FEBRUARY a Boston jury convicted a City Hospital obstetrician of manslaughter for the death of a fetus. Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin had aborted the fetus during an October 3, 1973, operation on a 17-year-old pregnant woman. Abortion, however, was not the issue, according to the prosecution. Newman A. Flanagan, the prosecutor, argued that the special nature of the operation produced, for a least one split second, a live birth, and that the subsequent death of the "baby" constituted an act of manslaughter.

Flanagan knew full well that abortion was protected by a 1973 Supreme Court ruling, so he redefined abortion as a process that can result in birth. Under such a definition, Edelin's crime occurred not in the course of an abortion, but after that abortion was over, when the fetus was no longer a fetus, but a human being.

The assistant district attorney's forensic legerdemain neatly circumvented the Supreme Court's landmark decision by prosecuting a doctor for an abortion without saying as much. The conviction, returned by a largely-Catholic jury, has, in turn, successfully intimidated obstetricians from performing second trimester abortions, especially those of the kind Edelin executed.

This is not the place to defend either a woman's right to determine the outcome of an unwanted pregnancy in consultation with a physician, or the right of a physician to exercise his best judgement. The Edelin decision and the continued prosecution of other City Hospital doctors are outrages to these rights. It is encouraging that Edelin is appalling the conviction, and that a state law that attempts to duplicate the effects of the decision in Rhode Island has been rejected by the courts. But it is regrettable that such a process of salvaging alienated rights ever had to begin.