Martin Haskell
American physician
William Mudd Martin Haskell (born 1946) is an American physician who, in 1992, described an abortion procedure known clinically as intact dilation and extraction (D&X), and popularly by the controversial, non-medical, non-technical term "partial-birth abortion".
Haskell was not the first physician to perform intact dilation and extraction. However, Haskell's 1992 presentation to the National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar in Dallas was the first detailed presentation of the technique.
Haskell's paper was obtained by the anti-abortion movement within weeks, and served as a catalyst for congressional hearings, federal legislation, multiple lawsuits, and more than thirty state bills prohibiting "partial-birth abortion". Newsweek reported that the director of the National Right to Life Committee could "hardly believe his luck" when he received an anonymously delivered copy of Haskell's paper, given its potential as a wedge issue. According to Harper's, the furor was in no small part due to an article in Life Advocate magazine by abortion opponent Jenny Westberg, who independently ordered National Abortion Federation literature containing Haskell's paper, wrote an article and illustrated the procedure with a series of pen-and-ink drawings. The drawings, which were "gruesome but not gory", and "made D&X compelling to look at for the very reason Martin Haskell had wanted to tell his colleagues about it: the fetus was intact", would later be distributed in numerous anti-abortion publications, brochures, and newspaper advertisements.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Martin Haskell” as american physician. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6775637. VIAF identifies the subject as 108998015. The Library of Congress control number is n50027434. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Martin Haskell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.