MA: abortionist pleads guilty to involuntary manslaughter

By Karen Jeffrey kjeffrey
@capecodonline.com 
September 14, 2010

BARNSTABLE — On the third anniversary of her death, the doctor who performed an abortion on Laura Hope Smith admitted that his actions led to her death while she was under his care. Yesterday in Barnstable Superior Court, with Smith's parents looking on, Dr. Rapin Osathanondh, 67, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. Smith, 22, never awoke after undergoing the procedure at the Women's Health Center in Hyannis on Sept. 13, 2007. The guilty plea followed an agreement between Cape and Islands First Assistant District Attorney Brian Glenny and defense attorneys Paul Cirel and Serina Barkley of Boston. For several hours yesterday, the lawyers negotiated back and forth, going to and from the chambers of Superior Court Judge Gary Nickerson with reports of their progress.

Throughout the day Glenny frequently stopped to discuss matters with Smith's parents, Tom and Eileen Smith. At the same time, Cirel and Barkley took their client aside to privately discuss offers on the table. Osathanondh faced a possible 20 years in state prison. But the recommended sentence, endorsed by prosecutor and defense, calls for less time in jail. He is scheduled to be sentenced today in Superior Court. If Nickerson approves that sentence — and there was nothing yesterday to suggest the judge would not — Osathanondh will serve three months in a county jail, nine months under home confinement with an electronic monitoring device, and three years of probation. Additionally, under the terms of this plea agreement, he must not practice medicine, nor teach.

Osathanondh was allowed 24 hours between pleading guilty and being sentenced in order to make arrangements for settling the civil suit in that case. An agreement in the civil case was also reached yesterday, according to the attorneys. Smith's mother filed the suit in Barnstable Superior Court not long after her daughter's death. The terms of the civil suit settlement were not released yesterday. Osathanondh, who resigned his license to practice medicine in 2008, spoke in a soft voice, admitting his guilt after he heard Nickerson recite the definition of involuntary manslaughter as a "wanton or reckless act," or "failure to act" in such a way that it creates "a grave risk to others."

Smith, who was born in Honduras, was raised and educated on Cape Cod following her adoption by Tom and Eileen Smith. She had studied cosmetology at the Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical School and was 13 weeks pregnant when she went to the clinic to terminate her pregnancy. Osathanondh, an obstetrician and a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health, was accused of failing to monitor Smith while she was under anesthesia and failing to call 911 in a timely fashion when he could not rouse her after the procedure.

Additionally, following their own investigation, the state board of medicine found Osathanondh lied repeatedly to his staff about the incident, telling them he gave Smith oxygen, monitored her pulse and claimed he and his assistant were certified in advanced cardiac life support.

Blue MA: Choose Life plates are now available

From even the bluest of states.....a church secretary worked on this for seven years...a good biblical number.
It is not easy to get this through and includes pre selling 1500 plates as  just one hurdle . The plates will cost $90 for two years. There's an initial $50 registration fee and $40 dollars charged for the special plate. $12 goes to the making of the plate and $28 goes to Choose Life Inc., a Massachusetts based nonprofit who then  distribute the money to crisis pregnancy centers in the states.


Of course the pro abortion groups are not happy ......stating their displeasure with not the message but the money going to crisis pregnancy centers. These are non profit entities who support life affirming options to crisis pregnancy and provide their services free of charge. What's not to like....well they don't  support abortions.


Recently a NY Times article states that abortion clinics are to training their counselors about adoption as a choice in an unplanned pregnancy.  Their referral rate for adoptions  is laughable compared to their abortion rate. Even the article expressed some skepticism about this approach...

Discussing these choices is always delicate, but perhaps even more so in this setting. Social workers in abortion clinics run the risk of sounding as if they’re offering a refutation of the service they are there to provide. As Ms. Page put it: “It’s like you’ve come to this Italian restaurant — do you really want the waiter saying, ‘There’s this great German place down the block, not sure how much you know about it, but you might like it’?”

Telling comment.......don't send paying business away.

 To many who have labored for abortion rights, it might seem at first blush that abortion clinics need adoption specialists the way fish need bicycles — that it represents an infiltration of the opposition. Corinna Lohser, one of the founders of the Adoption Access Network, said that when she worked at an abortion clinic in Cleveland years ago, she and many of her colleagues were wary of adoption, noting that abortion providers are “the ones getting all this harassment from protesters about adoption.”

Now Ms. Lohser, 33, works for Spence-Chapin Adoption Services, a New York adoption agency that supports abortion rights, and has come to regret the lack of information she had been able to provide women in Cleveland. If a client said she didn’t think she could carry a pregnancy to term, then never see the child again, Ms. Lohser’s response was, she recalled, “Yup, check, me either.” She did not realize how much more common open adoptions had become; she knew of no adoption agency that would speak to women with an open mind about abortion.  

Have you ever been in an abortion clinic and heard what a trained counselor says....I have. They push abortion as the only choice to solve the problem. Make it go away quickly........like it never happened. Quick Fix....  I have heard those who left the industry state that they were trained to target those who seemed  especially desperate to get them in right away even if you need to rearrange appointments....get them while they still were in the crisis mode.


It is hard for me to understand an adoption counselor being pro choice but I know some. I understand compartmentalizing your thinking.....have done it myself. But once you get that abortion ends the life of a human being.....and that person is not given his or her choice.....it is hard to justify all the other slogans that take you down the path that ends the life of another human being.


Anyway good for the church secretary and good for MA...the bluest of the blue. Read the full article here.