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In April 2016, multiple Facebook pages shared links to articles with titles claiming an abortionist strangled [a] baby following a botched abortion. The tendency of social media users to share items without clicking through to the content led many to believe that the link described a current event. Most of these links led to a 9 May 2013 LifeSiteNews article, which was three years old at the time of its April 2016 Facebook circulation. Nearly all versions included the same exact photograph of what appeared to be a full-term infant crying, an image dated to 2014, was in no way related to abortion, and depicted a healthy baby boy, Karson Hanson. How Karson's photograph came to be linked to the story wasn't clear. Even the 2013 article didn't describe anything recent. The events described were from 2 March 1977, and involved a saline abortion that reportedly resulted in a live birth: The story goes on to describe the doctor arriving at the clinic, angrily chasing chased all the nurses out of the room and making a call to another physician, Dr. Ronald Cornelson. (At that time, two doctors needed to be present to pronounce a premature baby dead.) The article presented many of its claims in a first-person, eyewitness style of reporting. Towards the end, it cited a separate anti-abortion blog as a source for its claims, saying the baby could have lived: The November 2006 blog post from which the article was sourced made no effort to clarify how information about the failed 1977 saline abortion was obtained (such as medical records, court documents, or individual accounts). Most mentions of the case were versions of the same original blog post written in 2006, citations for which were either too vague to lend clarification or long-since dead. Very little accessible material remained, including details of what was an eventual criminal case against Waddill; a summary was published by the Orange County Register in 2009: The trials pertained to complications that arose during a long-retired procedure known as a saline abortion. It bears mentioning that none of the details of the 1977 incident were relevant to the discussion of abortion in 2016, as saline abortions fell out of favor in the 1970s (and along with them, complications that could lead to a surviving fetus). Without this relevant context, readers were left with an impression that such an outcome was likely (or even possible) in 2016, which was misleading at best. A 6 April 1979 editorial in the Chicago Tribune weighed in on the merits of the case, and several local newspapers covered two trials associated with the failed abortion. The most detailed accounting came from a February 1993 article in the Los Angeles Times. That article (itself published more than a decade after the trial) indicated that crucial details such as the fetus' developmental stage and ultimate cause of death were never determined: Reports from February 1978 attributed the claims of strangulation and a version of the quoted remarks to the attending pediatrician's testimony, and the trial by all accounts was a function of lack of medical protocol: The later popular focus of the incident (Waddill's purported strangulation of the fetus) came not from forensic evidence, but testimony: The decades-old incident was ideal for purposes of editorializing precisely because so much time had passed, leaving details obfuscated and difficult to check. Social media users exposed to the item in 2016 could easily be led to believe that the story was recent; not only was the item circulating at that time published in 2013, it was sourced from a 2006 blog post. Even then, nearly 30 years had passed between the failed saline abortion and the story's emergence on anti-abortion blogs. It's true that an obstetrician-gynecologist named Dr. William Waddill performed an unsuccessful saline abortion on a young patient on 2 March 1977. It's also true that the abortion may have failed due to a later gestational age than anticipated. A witness and fellow doctor testified that Waddill strangled the dying fetus; Waddill maintained he was checking for a pulse. Even those condemning the doctor conceded that there was virtually no chance the fetus would have survived had care been rendered. The doctor was twice tried over the infant's death, but was found not guilty, and later resumed his practice. However, the circumstances under which that abortion went terribly wrong have long since been made exceedingly unlikely due to advances in medicine. Saline abortions were almost never used after the 1970s (due to risk to the mother), and today, updated diagnostic devices ensure that both patients and doctors receive a much better idea of how advanced a pregnancy is before proceeding with its termination.
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