Who the hell does he think he is?
In his negotiations with Canada, a former American ally, made demands that no nation should make of another.
The first major sticking point was Washington's proposed tre ..
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Dr. Vutch, Good and Bad
Illegal abortionists came in all shapes and sizes, from those with no medical training to fully trained medical personnel. Some qualified doctors were willing to risk their licenses to give women safe abortions prior to Roe v. Wade.
Some believed in a woman’s right to decide what she did with her body. Others saw women wanting abortions as cash cows.
Few of those who provided illegal abortions are still alive today. At best they would be in their 70s and up. Some received notoriety; others have taken their participation to the grave.
One doctor, Milan Vuitch, seems to have been a little bit of everything. He claimed to have done thousands of abortions within walking distance of the White House while the procedure was illegal.
That he became a licensed physician in the United States at all is a bit of fairy tale. He was born 15 January 1915 in Serbia, the child of peasants. After his father died, his mother supported the family as a vegetable farmer.
Obviously intelligent, Vuitch graduated from the University of Budapest on full scholarship. Semmelweis University, founded in 1769, is the medical school he was most likely to have attended. The university could not confirm or deny this. He allegedly graduated in 1939.
He was drafted into the Hungarian Army during WWII and practiced gynecology and surgery after the war. He taught at a medical school in Skopje.
I could find no mention of how he met and married his wife, an American, Florence Robinson. He migrated to the Washington, D.C. area in 1955 and eventually became a naturalized
U.S. citizen.
Dr. Vuitch’s first abortion was on a Hungarian woman who had fled the 1956 Hungarian revolution. He was said to have charged between $100 ($826 in 2018 dollars) and $200 ($1,652 in 2018 dollars).
By 1964 Vuitch was performing between 10 and 20 abortions weekly, although he had lacked hospital privileges since the year before. Unlike many doctors, who did illegal abortions and kept quiet, he was outspoken. He was arrested at least 16 times, not just in Washington, but also in Maryland and Virginia. However, except for one conviction in Montgomery County, he was found innocent.
In Lawrence Lader’s book, Abortion Two: Making the Revolution, Vuitch is quoted as saying, “Women cry for help and doctors just chase them away…I'm getting rid of medical absurdities. If you think that abortion is a medical service, you can't ignore it.”
He challenged the constitutionality of D.C.’s 1901 anti-abortion law. There were gray areas between a life-saving exception and overall giving an abortion for health reasons. His lawyers claimed “health” was vaguely defined.
Vuitch was indicted for violation of a D.C. Code. Federal Court Judge Gerhard A. Gesell (he later presided over the Washington Seven and Oliver North cases) wrote that there was “no clear standard to guide either the doctor, the jury or the court” in describing the word health. The health of the mother was often used as a guideline for a legal abortion.
Gesell also wrote, “A physician would not know if he was committing a crime when he performed an abortion, because a jury might later disagree with his opinion that the mother's health required it. [Thus] the doctors' problem was particularly acute because the burden was on them to prove that the abortion was justified.”
Vuitch said, “This is a big step forward. Now the government lawyer will be in the position of challenging my medical decision. What are the jury members going to decide when a lawyer tries to tell them that the doctor is wrong about a medical matter?”
D.C. was left without any law concerning abortion. Hospitals, public and private, stopped giving abortions. Two organizations, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), sued D.C. General Hospital twice. The hospital was forced, under court order, to perform abortions.
The Justice Department stepped in and the issue went to the Supreme Court.
The case was heard in United States v. Vuitch on 12 January 1971. The decision was announced on 21 April 1971 with a 5-4 split. They held that the Supreme Court had jurisdiction to determine if the District of Columbia’s abortion statute is unconstitutionally vague because, although the law only applies to the District of Columbia, the law was enacted by both Houses of Congress and signed into law by the President.
It was a step, albeit a weak one.
The different justices weighed in, and the variation of opinion shows that the Supreme Court held as many contrary opinions on the subject as the rest of the country.
Justice Hugo L. Black ruled that “health” refers to both the body and mind and therefore is not unconstitutionally vague. His wording made the prosecution for abortions more difficult.
William O. Douglas said that it gave the doctor too much discretion while Justice John M. Harlan felt that the court did not have jurisdiction because the case only applied to Washington D.C.
Justice Potter Stewart said that they did have jurisdiction but felt that that doctors who performed abortions should be immune from criminal prosecution if they were preserving the mother’s life and health.
Roe v. Wade, two years later, made abortion legal, but Vuitch continued to have problems.
If his fight for a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion was commendable, his practice of giving abortions was not. Just as some illegal abortionists went out of their way to try and provide a sterile and safe environment to the women, some legal abortionists such as Vuitch did not always use best practices.
Doris Miller (1919- 1943) Cook Petty Office First Class U.S. Navy
Without training and without orders he grabbed a gun and shot down Japanese planes during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
He carried wounded sailors to safety under fire.
Miller was listed as missing in action after a Japanese submarine fires four torpedoes sunk his ship Liscome Bay one year after Pearl Harbor.
We were three Exiles: my husband, former colleague and friend and me, sitting in a Geneva Indian restaurant.
We all said that we would be afraid to go back to the United States, to risk going through American customs. We've had friends and business associates detained.
I suspect the three of us are more up-to-date about current American problems than many Americans living in the United States.
We each moved to Switzerland for different reasons and took the nationality to be full voting citizens.
On 9/11 I checked the news mid afternoon as always. I ran to my colleague's office. We couldn't get updates from any American news source on the internet. He tried El Pais. I went home to watch various international channels telephoning to the two Americans working in my office among a plethora of nationalities.
American air space was closed.
That was the first time when I couldn't enter the U.S. An awful feeling. Not being able to have breakfast with my kid at Dempsey's, see the Make Way for Ducklings statue, look at the Massachusetts State House dome where my grandfather did some reconstruction engineering, walk on Bearskin Neck in Rockport, hurt.
My colleague and I followed American politics. We would contact Congress on various legislation.We may have left the States, but we had people we loved living there. We weren't traitors as many said we were.
The lies of nuclear threat from Iraq was followed by the U.S. attacking Iraq. We participated against it with the 10 million people protesting in over 600 cities. We were right. There were no nukes.
I had regular appointments with my bank. I was American. Americans all over the world were being denied financial services because of the American legislation FATCA. Banks spent millions identifying us so they would not be penalized by the American government.
Americans were too big a risk. The banks would be denied access to international services such as SWIFT and be heavily fined if they did not report all Americans doing business with them to the Americans.
The U.S. and Eritrea are the only two countries who tax their expats on world wide income. FATCA was designed to catch the tax cheats. Expats had bank accounts cancelled, jobs denied. Even local organizations such as sports clubs would have their banks accounts closed if their treasurer was found to be an American.
My bank gave me time to renounce my nationality, a gut-wrenching decision. Even so, the bank has called me in regularly since then to show my Certificate of Loss of Nationality.
Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that anyone who renounced their American nationality would no longer be allowed to enter the U.S. Fortunately, it never made it out of committee. Still, it was the second time I might not be able to get to my stepmom and daughter if they needed me.
I remained a news junkie, comparing newscasts from several countries. My husband and I watched in increasing horror at the events in the United States.
The horror of being the aggressor against other countries.The cruel treatment of not just immigrants but our citizens.
We watch in amazement at the ignorance of our former fellow citizens, the willingness of some to ignore the cruelty and corruption, and the values that the country was founded on. Even if laws were sometimes ignored it was not the norm.
The situation got worse and worse and once again I feel it dangerous to try and enter my birth country. Not because of my renunciation alone but because of things I've published,
I am afraid to enter the U.S. This is different from my many non American-friends who do not want to enter the U.S. because of people they know who have had trouble or they are horror-strickened by what the U.S. is doing.
Over our excellent Indian dishes, sitting next to the air conditioner, the three of us talked of many things, besides what we feel is the destruction of our birth country and frustration that people do not see the danger. Worse, far too many people agree with what is happening.
In the 100+ Free Writes the three of us agreed that this was the hardest. Before we read them to each other we called our writing "lame," not that Free Writes are meant to be finished pieces. Maybe we can blame the five canicules (heat waves) that lasted most of the summer as responsible for melting our brains. Next week we'll be in two countries and communicating by the internet.
This was our last session at Martel. The waitress knows us well and informed us Julia was on her way.
Rick's Free Write
There is a legend in the village that it is inhabited by fairies and gnomes.
They only emerge at night when no humans – and especially no cats or dogs – are around to see them.
They get together in the square near the water trough, where they sing and dance, tossing pixie dust everywhere.
One night some evil trolls wandered up from the riverbank, looking to create mischief. The river was drying up and the trolls meant to steal the water from the village.
A pair of gnome sentries spotted the trolls strolling up the hill and sounded the alarm.
As the trolls approached the water trough, all the gnomes and fairies were hidden.
Just as the trolls climbed on the ledge of the trough, all of the gnomes rushed to push then into the water. Then the fairies sprinkled special purple pixie dust, turning the water into prune juice, which the trolls hate.
You never saw trolls run so fast!
D-L's Free Write
"Put the ladder closer to the window," Marilyn said.
"The paint's not dry." Joanne's fingers were the same dusty rose as the ladder.
Marilyn was finishing the headless bird doll. The three girls designed Frida wings and stick legs.
"That will show her." Marilyn stuck a blue bowl on the doll for the head.
"Her Mom will be mad, especially since we got paint on the wall," Joanne said.
The three eleven-year olds had snuck under the hedge. The hard part had been getting ladder under.
"I'm just sorry we won't be able to see Amy trying to explain it to her mom. That will teach Amy to say we cheated on a Math test when we didn't."
They were right. Amy's mom, who was a bit OCD, was upset at the paint on the wall and punished Amy.
Revenge.
Julia's Free Write
Lordy only knows what I’ll write this time!
She had had a few upsets in her life so had learned to roll with the punches.
This particular time, it was her son’s separation and his return to the family home.
She was the only one who actually had some positive as she saw the grandkids more often.
It had also led to the sorting and tossing of 45 years accumulated “stuff.”
One grandson was taking after his uncle and loved handicrafts, so she saved toilet paper rolls, egg cartons, colored paper and the like.
One day they were outside and saw a discarded wooden frame waiting to be taken to the dump.
Crayons and permission had it colored as high as they could reach.
Then it was “we have to decorate it”. Some cardboard, pipe cleaners, beads and pastel watercolors produced a piece of artwork that anyone would be proud of: two small children discovering their creativity.
About the Free Writers
Rick Adams is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices.com, a weekly newsletter reporting the airline industry top stories . He is the author of The Robot in the Simulator. AI in Aviation Training.
Visit D-L.'s website https://dlnelsonwriter.com, She is the author of 15 fiction and three non fiction books. Her 300 Unsung Women, bios of women who battled gender limitations, can be purchased at https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/300-unsung-women-d-l-nelson/1147305797?ean=9798990385504
Visit Julia's blog. She has written and taken photos and loves syncing up with friends. Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/
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