The meeting of the American Medical Association in the year 1865 seemed not only to be fractured by the Civil War, but also by the research of a fellow doctor who dared to stand forth and condemn a practice rapidly growing in the United States. Not only was the practice of abortion secretly expanding, legal justification for the protection and promotion of the act was slowly making its way to the legislative chamber. With this paper, The Criminality and Physical Evils of Forced Abortion, Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer thwarted the attempt of some in the AMA to press forward with support for legal abortions. His effort reminds us too that one person can make a difference in holding up a trend—at least for a season.
In the majority of instances of forced abortion, the act is committed prior to the usual period of quickening. There are other women, who have confessed to me that they have destroyed their children long after they have felt them leap within their womb. There are others still, whom I have known to willfully suffocate them during birth, or to prevent the air from reaching them under the bedclothes; and there are others, who have willfully killed their wholly separated and breathing offspring, by strangling them or drowning them, or throwing them into a noisome vault. Wherein among all these criminals does there in reality exist any difference in guilt?
I would gladly arrive at, and avow any other conviction than that I have now presented, were it possible in the light of fact and of science, for I know it must carry grief and remorse to many an otherwise innocent bosom. The truth is, that our silence has rendered all of us accessory to the crime, and now that the time has come to strip down the veil, and apply the searching caustic or knife to this foul sore in the body politic, the physician needs courage as well as his patient, and may well overflow with regretful sympathy.
But not only is abortion of excessively frequent occurrence; the nefarious practice is yearly extending, as does every vice that custom and habit have rendered familiar. It is foolish to trust that a change for the better may be spontaneously effected. “Longer silence and waiting by the profession would be criminal. If these wretched women, these married, lawful mothers, ay, and these Christian husbands, are thus murdering their children by thousands, through ignorance, they must be taught the truth; but if, as there is reason to believe is too often the case, they have been influenced to do so by fashion, extravagance of living, or lust, no language of condemnation can be too strong.”[1]
[1] Frederick N. Dyer, Champion of Women and the Unborn: Horatio Robinson Storer, M.D. (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1999), 195-197.