State Inquiry Into ‘1st Baby of Year’ Opens

State medical officials are investigating an Anaheim general practitioner who timed the delivery of a baby on New Year’s Eve so he could tuck the infant into a Christmas stocking, whisk her to Melodyland Christian Center, and display the first baby of 1990 before a nationally televised religious service.

The conduct of Dr. Charles Wesley Turner Jr. in orchestrating a delivery for the telecast was “very unusual,” said one investigator at the Board of Medical Quality Assurance, the state agency which regulates physicians.

Though Turner said that neither Brigitte Palmer nor her 6-pound, 12-ounce baby girl, Myra Kristine, was harmed by Turner’s actions, the medical board on Wednesday opened a formal investigation into the incident, sources confirmed.

In addition to the latest inquiry, the 64-year-old Turner was already being investigated by the medical quality board for negligence in obstetrical care, sources close to the inquiry said. Investigators declined to give details, and Turner said he was unaware of the earlier probe.

The doctor, who boasts of delivering more than 18,000 babies in his 40-year career, insisted Wednesday that he was very good at delivering babies and any criticism was unfair.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having the first baby of the New Year. And the baby was delivered safely,” Turner said. “And I see nothing wrong with taking the baby and showing it to the 4,000” people gathered at Melodyland’s midnight service.

The baby was delivered at Turner’s Covenant Birthing Center at 15 seconds after midnight on Monday. Turner said he administered a spinal anesthesia, called a saddle block, at 11:45 p.m. Sunday to the mother and then used forceps to pull the baby out. The newborn was then quickly cleaned up, wrapped in a blanket and put in a stocking.

The doctor then ran with the infant about 150 feet to Melodyland Christian Center, where a midnight religious service was taking place. The crowd “yelled and screamed and applauded” the appearance of the newborn, who was returned to the mother about 10 minutes later.

Melodyland’s pastor, the Rev. Ralph Wilkerson, had asked Turner about three months ago if the doctor could provide a newborn for the New Year’s Eve service, Turner said. Also present at the service was a Christian weight-lifting team, and during the baby’s three-minute appearance on the podium, one weightlifter patted the baby’s head.

Turner said about five expectant mothers were in the birthing center the night of Dec. 31. He decided that the 25-year-old Palmer would deliver the year’s first baby because he expected the baby to be small and “easier to come out.”

Gary Palmer, the baby’s father, said his wife’s due date was Feb. 4--five weeks later than the newborn’s birth date.

Turner now calculates that he delivered the baby about three weeks early, but the woman went into labor naturally and “there was no evidence of prematurity,” he said. The estimation of the actual date of conception can vary from one week to 10 days, he said.

Asked if he worried about taking a baby born three weeks early outside the birthing center, Turner replied no. “The baby was out of the delivery area three minutes. It did not affect the baby in any way at all.”

“The baby was covered up with blankets” when she was taken to the religious service “and the baby was immediately taken back and put under the heat” lights, he said. The baby’s temperature was checked upon her return and it was 98.2 degrees, he added, “so the baby suffered in no way.”

In addition to the medical quality board inquiries, Turner was named in a wrongful death lawsuit in 1988 after a child that he delivered at Santa Ana Hospital Medical Center died immediately after birth. The suit by the parents of infant Ana Asia, still pending in Orange County Superior Court, alleges that Turner caused the baby’s death on Oct. 3, 1987, by failing to perform a “timely” Cesarean section.

Turner denied any wrongdoing in the case Wednesday.

Turner remains on the staff there but lost his privilege to practice obstetrics at the hospital sometime around 1988 because his cases had “some complications,” a hospital official said.

Also, in 1984, the medical quality board accused Turner of illegally prescribing dangerous drugs and placed his license on five years’ probation. That probation was lifted last year. Turner pleaded no contest in Orange County Municipal Court to a misdemeanor charge related to the same case and was placed on three years’ criminal probation and fined $15,000.

Turner graduated from the University of Arkansas medical school in 1950 and was licensed to practice medicine in California in 1953. Although his specialty is obstetrics, Turner said Wednesday that he never served a formal residency in that specialty. Rather, in 1951, while working at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Chicago, he worked “every other day” for a year delivering babies, Turner said.

As news spread Wednesday of Turner’s race to deliver the first baby of the year, other doctors and birthing center authorities questioned both the propriety and safety of his actions.

Dr. Roger Schlesinger, president of the Orange County Obstetrics and Gynecological Society, said he thought that Turner was taking a risk when he took the newborn baby out of his birthing center and ran next door to Melodyland Christian Center to show her off to the congregation.

“I don’t think I’d take my newborn out of a hospital,” Schlesinger said. “Any newborn baby requires some degree of observation. Some have low blood sugars. Some convulse.” By moving the infant immediately, “you don’t have adequate time to know that the baby is stable and then you take a baby to a place with no resuscitation equipment.”

“Babies are pretty hardy,” Schlesinger continued. “Most do well. But some don’t. So I guess he was playing the odds a bit.”

Also, Schlesinger said he believed that a doctor who delivers a baby should not also be administering the anesthesia.

“The old concept of the obstetrician giving the anesthetic and then running around and taking care of the mother and baby at the other end of the table” is no longer considered good medicine, Schlesinger said. If the mother were to have a bad reaction to the anesthetic, “you can’t handle two problems at once,” he said, referring to the baby’s delivery and the mother’s anesthesia.

Operators and experts on low-risk birthing centers expressed shock at Turner’s actions.

Kitty Ernst, executive director of the National Assn. of Childbearing Centers criticized Turner’s use of both forceps and anesthesia. (Turner is not a member of her association and said Wednesday that he had never heard of it.)

“Those are both acute care treatments, and they belong in a hospital” for safety of both mother and baby, Ernst said.

Dr. Howard E. Marchbanks, owner of a La Habra birthing center, the Marchbanks Alternative Childbearing Center, agreed.

“The whole concept of a birth center is you are not using anesthesia. If we have to give anesthesia or we want to use forceps, we take the patient to the hospital because of the danger to the baby and to damaging the birth canal.”

Turner replied that he has often administered a saddle-block anesthetic and used forceps without incident in his deliveries, often with his wife, Roberta, a nurse-anesthetist, by his side.

“I have never had a complication with a saddle block for 42 years,” he said.

State officials noted that they knew of no formal complaints against Turner’s birthing center, which he started in November, 1988, on property leased from Melodyland. Since then, the facility has handled 349 deliveries, sometimes with Turner tending as many as 10 women in labor at a time, the physician said.

In only three of those cases did a mother experience complications that required him to transfer her baby to a hospital, Turner said. “Every other baby, I have sent home with the mother,” he declared proudly.

Relatives of the baby born Jan. 1 praised Turner for his actions.

“I don’t see anything wrong with that (hastening the delivery in order to show the baby on TV),” said Al Olson of Orange, stepfather of the newborn baby’s father.

Turner also earned praise years ago from the judge who disciplined him in the earlier medical quality board case.

Turner “has a reputation as a competent, conscientious physician with a special interest in good care of patients,” Administrative Law Judge W.F. Byrnes wrote in a February, 1984, decision regarding the drug-dispensing case.

At the medical quality board administrative hearing, however, Byrnes found the doctor guilty of professional misconduct by excessively prescribing controlled and dangerous drugs, including the amphetamine Dexedrine and the tranquilizer Valium--without conducting a medical examination.

Turner was named in a state attorney general’s accusation, filed in conjunction with the licensing agency, after he sold the drugs to Board of Medical Quality Assurance investigators during an undercover inquiry in 1981 and 1982.

“His misconduct seems to have stemmed from a weakness in giving in to the desires of patients, by letting them dictate their own medication for purposes that are now approved,” Byrnes wrote in allowing Turner to be placed on probation rather than have his license revoked.

On Feb. 9, 1983, Turner entered a no-contest plea in the county’s Central Municipal Court on a charge of unlawful prescription of a controlled substance. The case was a result of the same state undercover operation which produced the attorney general’s accusations. Turner was placed on probation, fined $15,000 and ordered to donate five hours a week to community service.

Turner said Wednesday that three medical quality board agents had unfairly “induced me into writing prescriptions” for a reliable weight control drug, Dexedrine, that had just been classified as a narcotic.

ANOTHER VIEW--The race to get the baby on television has a different effect on columnist Dianne Klein.B1