Eileen Smith’s daughter and grandchild were killed in Hyannis, Massachusetts, just two short years ago. The tragedy is that they both died from a “safe and legal” abortion. When she wrote her story, a good friend and reporter, Gail Besse, e-mailed me about it. I then got in touch with Eileen to ask if she would like to expand on this real-life horror story herself. She replied, “I will defer to you and yours to write it. I am available for any questions or clarifications. I just want to get it out.”
I accepted the challenge, and here is what needs to get out:
Laura died on the wrong side of Kennedy’s politics
By Eileen Smith
Laura Hope Smith died from a botched abortion in a doctor’s office in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on September 13, 2007, down the street from the Kennedy compound. I raised my family on Cape Cod, near the medical mecca of the world (Boston), with a false sense of security. Surely all our medical needs would be taken care of with the latest of technologies and the best doctors. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined my daughter would be “killed” by a Harvard fellow doctor [a recipient of a Harvard Medical School fellowship] who practiced 3rd-world medicine.
In January, a few months after my daughter’s death, I knew I had to contact Senator Kennedy, the head of the U.S. Senate Health Committee. Surely he would want to know what was happening in his own back yard in Hyannis. He certainly would not stand for such “abortions.” I had visions of him personally closing down the office in righteous indignation. I had not followed Kennedy’s political career and did not know he left his Catholic moorings of “respect for life” and joined the “choice” group. I was unaware of life politics at the time. I thought all Catholics were for life. It was a given. After all, the pope was watching!
I made a personal visit to the senator’s Washington, D.C. office at the Senate, by appointment, and met with one of his aides. We spoke for almost an hour; she was polite, listened and took notes. She assured me I would hear back from her or someone else. One month went by. I called her, reminded her who I was and refreshed her on my story. Again I was assured I would hear something. I never did. Never got a call back. Never an ounce of concern came from Senator Ted Kennedy or his office regarding my daughter, whose life was [cut] short, carelessly, by [a] Harvard fellow. To this day, I cannot dignify him with the title of doctor. I refer to him by his first name, Rapin. Ironic, isn’t it? Rapin? I feel my daughter’s life was raped from her, along with my grandchild’s.
Much later, I heard that Kennedy came down with brain cancer. I am sure he had the best of care by [the] highest caliber of doctors. But in the end it didn’t matter; it was terminal. At least his family knew his end was near and could say goodbye. Laura and I never had that chance.
A few weeks after Laura and the baby died, Troy Newman of Operation Rescue issued a media release in which he explained that just 10 days after the two had died, the abortionist, Rapin Osathanondh, met with Eileen in what can only be described as a macabre encounter:
He required that Smith meet him alone and in a public place, refusing to allow even Smith’s husband, Tom, to accompany her. During that meeting Osathanondh showed Smith Laura’s medical records, but would not allow them to be copied. Smith was upset by what she saw, and decided to take legal action to obtain access to the records.
“Although they are not in our hands yet, but should be soon. Let’s hope they are the same records that I saw the first time,” Smith told Operation Rescue.
“Osathanondh resigned his medical license in February [2008] after the medical board accused him of misconduct, and he was permanently barred from practicing medicine in Massachusetts,” the Boston Globe reported. Further, an investigation conducted by two law enforcement agencies and the Massachusetts state medical board concluded that the abortionist’s conduct was “willful, wanton, and reckless.”
In March, the Cape Cod Times reported on the upcoming trial, which could take place within weeks:
“Laura Smith was about 13 weeks pregnant when she went to the Women’s Health Center in Hyannis. She was engaged to her first boyfriend from high school with whom she had reconnected over the previous year, according to her mother.
“Today I am picking out her tombstone when I should be picking out my mother of the bride dress,” Eileen Smith writes in the Aug. 6, 2008, affidavit. “Rapin Osathanondh has caused great harm and there is no end in sight.”
Last year, Besse reported on Eileen's campaign for justice:
Vowing that her daughter’s death would “not be swept under the rug,” Smith has spoken tirelessly on the pro-life circuit after Operation Rescue in Kansas first contacted her…
“I believed if I lived my Christian life, preached the gospel, raised my children with Christian principles, that not only would abortion not touch my home, but we could make converts to Christianity and thereby lower the numbers. I was wrong on all counts,” she said.
She now realizes that God “is the head of the pro-life movement and He will guide and direct and empower us if we but hear His voice and follow His heart.” All Christian leaders need to “make life a major priority in their mission and pulpits,” she said.
What is fundamentally troubling about this case, however, is what I learned this past week, when I first heard about Eileen Smith and started communicating with her. Her daughter’s death – at the time it occurred and in the months and years that followed – was never reported by mainstream national media. There were, of course, as we have mentioned, a few local stories about Laura’s demise, but when one compares this tragedy, involving the direct acts of an abortionist, with the death of abortionist Tiller and examines the coverage each event received, the mainstream media’s unseemly and unfathomable insensitivity takes on an entirely new dimension. As the Christian Examiner reports,
Eileen Smith said she fought for months to get mainstream media outlets to cover the September death of Laura Hope Smith, who died on an abortion operating table, yet Tiller’s death brought an outpouring of national media headlines and Congressional condolences to his family by a resolution approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.
The bereaved mother said most news reports about her daughter came from nonprofit organizations, religious news and other alternative media.
”Where was the press when my daughter Laura died at the hands of an abortionist?” Smith asked, adding that Laura’s death was finally mentioned 10 months later in one major publication, The Boston Globe, when the abortion doctor was indicted for manslaughter.
It was six weeks before her local paper, The Cape Cod Times, mentioned Laura’s death, although it sought out her mother for a two-hour interview just two days after Laura’s death. Smith says the local newspaper rationalized delaying a report on Laura’s death so it could corroborate it with an autopsy report…
In expressing her frustration, Smith said she is not minimizing the tragedy of Tiller’s murder. At the same time, though, she pointed out that as many as 60,000 viable babies are believed to have been aborted by Tiller.
”His death is a tragedy, but so are all the lives that were taken by him and the lives of over 400 women who have died as a result of an abortion,” Smith said.
“I call on the media to report deaths like Laura’s. If Tiller’s death merits national news, so does a death at the hands of an abortionist.”
We cannot say to a valiant mother and grandmother such as Eileen Smith, “We feel your pain,” because we do not, unless we have lost two loved ones at the hands of an abortionist. What we can do is hearken to her plea for fair news reporting. Laura and her baby were no less important to the human family than Dr. George Tiller or Senator Edward M. Kennedy. In fact, in the eyes of God, each human being is invaluable, unrepeatable and equally precious.
Each of us can do something about this tragic loss. The first thing we can do is pray for this family, for it is certain that during the upcoming trial, great anguish will be experienced as the wounds of loss are reopened and examined under a court microscope. We can let Eileen Smith know of our concern and our support for her at her blog site.
We can share this story with our family, friends and church members. We can ask our local media where they were two years ago. Where are they now? When will the truth be told?
The act of abortion is not safe and according to the laws of God, it is not legal. Tell the truth.