Eileen wrote:
I also note the use of "birth canal" to describe the vagina as if a woman had an exit chute on her baby factory; and the use of "womb" in place of 'uterus'. Both these terms, and the misstatement of the time the procedure is performed, lead me to believe the article was mainly written by somebody opposed to abortion who was more interested in getting a subtle message out then actually providing honest information. Since we are describing a medical procedure appropriate medical/biological terminology which is well understood by the general population is the appropriate vocabulary.
May I suggest reading this article before using the term "PBA" as loosely as it is used in your current entry. http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/499/
In both these cases, the problem is that there is no entirely neutral terminology. Using strictly medical terms is considered biased by the anti-abortion community, as they see it as an attempt to cast a moral issue as a strictly sanitized medical issue; using non-medical terms is seen as similarly biased by the pro-abortion community. My preferred solution would be to use both sets of terms interchangeably--both "womb" and "uterus" and both "birth canal" and "vagina/cervix/vulva"). In particular I don't really see anything wrong with "birth canal", and have seen it used in pro-abortion literature as well as anti-abortion literature.
As for the term "Partial Birth Abortion" itself, there's no good solution to that either that I can see. Certainly there some be some discussion about the controversy over terminology, but simply adopting an alternate term would be biased as well. The only other term in reasonably widespread use is "late term abortion", but as you pointed out some of these procedures do not actually occur in the last trimester, so can't really fall under that heading. So I'd say keeping the term PBA with the qualification that some abortion supporters object to the term is the best solution.
I have linked Dr. Haskell's paper on my web site. To the best of my knowledge since this was presented at a public forum and also was presented into evidence at a Senate hearing it would be considered "public domain' so there really is no reason you may not add it to your papers if you so desire.
I don't think this particular claim is true. Plenty of copyright papers are presented at public fora and remain copyrighted (Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech is probably the most well-known). I don't think things entered into evidence at Senate hearings are automatically stripped of copyright either, but someone more familiar with copyright law would have to comment on that.
As a general comment, while I think it is a good thing to make medical articles more precise, Wikipedia is also not a medical encyclopedia, so articles should be written in a general context and for a general audience. Taking a strictly clinical view of some of these controversial issues would itself be adopting a point of view, and we don't wish to endorse any particular point of view. I'll also note that there's a ton of propaganda on both sides of the issue here: anti-abortionists try to make their descriptions of "PBA" as gruesome as possible, while abortion supporters try to make their descriptions of "PBA" sound as much like a "normal" surgical procedure as possible, to emphasize the "move along, nothing to see here" POV (or, alternately, so jargon-filled and obtuse as to be incomprehensible to a general audience). I don't think either is a good solution, which is why I object somewhat to your suggestion that we should adopt more clinical terminology in the article (I'd similarly object to suggestions from the other side that we adopt particularly gruesome terminology). You do seem aware that there is propaganda surrounding this issue, but you seem much more aware of propaganda on one side of the issue than on the other side.
-Mark