OAK BLUFFS - With his sport shirt untucked, his eyeglasses hanging around his neck, and his deck shoes slapping the sidewalk as he good-naturedly bemoans the state of his golf game, he could be any retiree enjoying the midday sun on Martha's Vineyard.
You'd never guess that Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin played a leading role in one of the most tumultuous episodes in recent Boston history, that he was at the center of an abortion case that propelled him into the national debate over Roe v. Wade - a debate that rages to this day.
And so, in his quiet way, does Kenneth Edelin, at least when he thinks about his 1975 manslaughter conviction - eventually overturned - and the way his life was turned upside down for what he sees as political and religious reasons.
Edelin has written a searingly angry account of his trial and conviction titled "Broken Justice: A True Story of Race, Sex and Revenge in a Boston Courtroom." Tonight from 7 to 9, Edelin will be at Barnes & Noble at Boston University to read from his book, in which he argues that he was targeted by antiabortion forces determined to make an example of him.
"I had to get this book done," says Edelin, 68. "I've been trying to do it for 30 years. It was burning to get out."
The city itself was running a high fever in the mid-1970s when Edelin was thrust into the spotlight. Mandatory busing, ordered by a federal judge to desegregate the public schools, had further inflamed pre-existing racial tensions. National TV newscasts showed white adults stoning school buses filled with black students. Meanwhile, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion had sent shock waves through a city with a strong Irish-Catholic identity.
Into this volatile mixture came a young African-American doctor who had been raised in segregated Washington, and who was privately coping with the dissolution of his marriage.
The notion of a medical career, of being a healer, had taken root in the mind of Kenneth Edelin as a boy, as he watched his mother slowly dying of breast cancer. Ruby Edelin had always been the rock, the one that other family members turned to for advice. "She was it," says her son. "She was the center."
After his mother underwent a mastectomy, she called him in to her room and showed him the result of the surgery. "I've thought a lot about it: Why would she show an 11-year-old her scar?" Edelin says. He pauses for several long moments, then offers, "I think she wanted me to understand."
In "Broken Justice," Edelin is forthcoming about his experiences with abortion well before he got to Boston. He opens the book by recounting how he witnessed the death of a teenage girl because of an illegal abortion when he was a medical student in 1966 in Nashville. He also describes how, when he was in his early 20s, his girlfriend got pregnant, and they went to New York so she could get an abortion.
By the time Edelin came to Boston in 1971, he saw it as his mission to focus on caring for poor black women. He found the chance to do that at Boston City Hospital, where, in 1973, Edelin was named chief resident in obstetrics and gynecology, the first African-American to hold that position in BCH history. Edelin loved delivering babies, and he delivered many of them. He worked in a prenatal clinic for pregnant teenagers, and was often asked to be godfather to their children. He also, along with other BCH physicians, performed abortions.
On Oct. 3, 1973, he performed a second-trimester abortion on a 17-year-old from Roxbury. Ten months earlier, in its Roe v. Wade decision, the US Supreme Court had legalized abortion and ruled that state governments could only prohibit abortions "subsequent to viability." The ruling said that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks), but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."
After several unsuccessful attempts at abortion by saline infusion, Edelin opted to perform a procedure called a hysterotomy. Prosecutors would later argue that the fetus was 24 to 28 weeks old, and that Edelin had caused its death after it was born alive. In "Broken Justice," Edelin writes that from his examination of the teenager, whom he has given the pseudonym Evonne, he concluded that she was 17 or 18 weeks pregnant. After the hysterotomy, he writes, "the fetus showed no signs of life. It had already died in Evonne's womb."
But in April 1974, a grand jury indicted Edelin on a charge of manslaughter. "The right-to-lifers were looking for this kind of case," Edelin says now. "And they found it."
"In Boston, it was the perfect storm," he says. "It was the religious climate; it was the racial climate. [Boston] had always been a cauldron when it came to women's rights. It was the right place and the right time for those who wanted to make a statement. It was the wrong place and the wrong time for me."
Suddenly, headlines and TV newscasts were shouting Edelin's name. "I was scared. I was scared," Edelin recalls. "I was very law-abiding, very careful about image. That's how I was brought up. Then somebody indicts you for manslaughter."
The case reverberated well beyond Boston, drawing national and even international attention. Supporters and opponents of abortion rights squared off over the merits of the case. Legal and medical experts said the Edelin trial might resolve a lingering question from the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling as to when a fetus becomes "viable," able to live independently of its mother. "All the facets of 'When does life begin?', of religion, of philosophy, all those things I was at the epicenter of," Edelin says.
The lead prosecutor in the case was Newman Flanagan, who was then an assistant district attorney and would later serve as Suffolk County district attorney. In "Broken Justice," Edelin calls Flanagan "the horrible little man with the flowery tie," caricatures his Boston accent, and is scathingly critical of Flanagan's conduct of the case. Through his son, James, Newman Flanagan declined to comment.
The case was heard by an all-white, mostly Catholic jury of nine men and three women. On Feb. 15, 1975, they pronounced their verdict: Guilty. Edelin had to call his 7-year-old son with the news. It was the only time during the 10-month ordeal that the physician cried. "He said to me: 'Daddy, why are they saying that you killed a baby?' " Edelin recalls.
A year later, the Supreme Judicial Court overturned the verdict. The SJC ruled that Edelin "committed no wanton or reckless acts in carrying out the medical procedures on October 3, 1973," and closed with these words: "A larger teaching of this case may be that, whereas a physician is accountable to the criminal law even when performing professional tasks, any assessment of his responsibility should pay due regard to the unavoidable difficulties and dubieties of many professional judgments."
But the decision did not erase the scars for Edelin, then or now. "People have said to me that 'All this notoriety must have been good for your career'," says Edelin. "I cringe when people say that."
Nonethless, Edelin spent the rest of his professional life in Boston. In addition to serving as head of OB/GYN at BCH, he chaired the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine. He was also the board chairman of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. He retired last year as associate dean of students and minority affairs at the BU medical school and now divides his time between Oak Bluffs and Sarasota, Fla., with his wife, Barbara.
He says he is "very afraid" that Roe v. Wade will be overturned by the increasingly conservative US Supreme Court. "I think we have to fight for Roe," he says. "The next two presidential elections are going to be critical. I don't see abortion and the right to choose as an issue of right or left, or Democrat or Republican."
As to his own role in the long debate over abortion, Edelin leaves little doubt he will continue to speak out. When numerous agents and publishers took a pass on the book, he published it himself, and he is traveling around the country to promote it. He was determined to have his say about his trial - and about the lessons it may hold for the present.
"I may not think about it every day, but it has an impact on me every day," he says. "It has changed me, and made me the man I am at 68."
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.
