The father of American gynecology fought to criminalize abortion in the 1850s
Horatio Storer’s legacy remains even after Roe v. Wade
When does life begin? According to the anti-abortion movement, the answer is at conception. But when did that idea begin? It sounds biblical, but the notion was actually popularized by 19th-century surgeon Horatio Robinson Storer, who singlehandedly brought the American medical establishment into the fight against abortion. In fact, the laws restricting abortion that were passed at Storer’s urging were largely in place until being overturned by Roe v. Wade in 1973.
Often considered the father of American gynecology, Storer was a Boston-born, Harvard-educated obstetrician who studied abroad in Scotland before opening his own practice in his native city in 1855. Though primarily interested early in his career in experimenting with and administering anesthetic agents during childbirth, Storer quickly turned his attention to the question we now call fetal personhood. By 1857, he had begun the “physicians’ crusade against abortion,” a national campaign, and was lobbying the American Medical Association (AMA) to advocate institutionally against the practice.
The AMA had been formed in 1847 in order to professionalize the field of medicine and standardize its practices. But there was no mention of abortion in the group’s original Code of Ethics, and it wasn’t until Storer petitioned for the formation of the Committee on Criminal Abortion in 1857 that the organization took up the issue. The AMA made Storer chairman of that committee, and requested that he prepare a report on abortion in the U.S.
At the time, it was widely believed that physical and psychological problems among women were rooted in the womb. The ovariotomy — the removal of one or both ovaries — was “the most common sexual surgery performed in the late 19th century,” writes Andrea Tone in Controlling Reproduction: An American History. In 1865, Storer wrote a paper called “The Origins of Insanity in Women,” which he delivered to the AMA congress. In the paper, Storer advocated for ovariotomies, arguing that for women who “have become habitually thievish, profane, or obscene, despondent or self-indulgent, shrewish or fatuous,” the best solution is to “remove the cause”: a woman’s reproductive organs.
Abortion has always been a fraught issue, but for much of Western history it was considerably less contentious because the contours of human life were more plainly drawn. Debate around abortion had long centered on quickening, the moment in a pregnancy (usually around 16–20 weeks) when a woman can feel a fetus moving. Earlier in the 19th century, abortion before quickening was legal. It wasn’t really even considered abortion, as pregnancy was imagined more “in terms of a lack of something (menstruation) rather than the presence of something (a fetus),” according to historian Anna M. Peterson. Quickening was widely considered a kind of threshold, a moment signaling passage into real pregnancy — and to many, the moment of “ensoulment,” to use the Catholic term.
But Storer urged the American Medical Association to challenge the quickening doctrine, and he framed his objection as purely scientific. He urged his fellow doctors to “set aside all the speculations of the metaphysicians regarding moral accountability of the foetus, the ‘potential man’ and its ‘inanimate vitalities,’ as useless as they are bewildering.” Rather, he argued, “If we have proved the existence of foetal life before quickening has taken place or can take place […] we are compelled to believe unjustifiable abortion always a crime.”
Previously, physicians had only advocated for abortion when the life of a mother or child was in danger, but Storer pushed for an expanded view of fetal personhood, urging the AMA to “enter into an earnest and solemn protest” against abortion, and to petition lawmakers to criminalize it. The AMA adopted Storer’s report unanimously in 1859. It remained the organization’s official policy until 1967.
Of course, to claim Storer’s objections to abortion were purely empiricist or scientific is not to detach them from the overwhelmingly sexist context in which they were forged. Popular opinion about abortion at the time was informed by Victorian social mores, and the “yellow” press was delighting in printing salacious stories about the dire misfortunes — physical and legal — befalling “loose” women who dared to procure the procedure illegally. In an 1866 essay called “Why Not? A Book for Every Woman” Storer himself wrote, “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.” That essay won a prize from the AMA for “best short and comprehensive tract calculated for circulation among females, and designed to enlighten them upon the criminality and physical evils of forced abortion.”
In their book The Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement: The Rise of ‘Pro-Woman’ Rhetoric in Canada and the United States, Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon point out that although the wholesale adoption of an anti-abortion stance among physicians might make it seem like the issue was already deeply polarizing, historians claim that many physicians were acting largely out of self-interest: “By using abortion as a wedge issue and publicly opposing it, the AMA was able to portray itself as morally and professionally superior to the practice of midwifery; this allowed the AMA to undercut the influence of midwives.”
In other words, the crusade against abortion — and the attendant medicalization of pregnancy — was one major way medical providers solidified and advanced their own expertise about women’s reproductive health, and differentiated scientific knowledge from the folk knowledge of midwives and the moral authority of religious leaders. During this period, according to historian Anna M. Petersen, “Women’s experiences […] were discredited as unscientific and medical doctors became the recognized experts on pregnancy and fetal development.”
The origins of the pro-life movement in America are often thought to be the 1960s, when anti-abortion groups formed in opposition to growing feminist agitation for reproductive freedom. In his 2016 book Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade, historian Daniel K. Williams lays out a different trajectory for the movement, arguing that rather than being informed solely by conservative values, the anti-abortion movement coalesced in the mid- to late 20th century around the postwar liberal discourse of human rights. An even fuller historical picture of the powerful “right-to-life” movement in this country would also take into account the contributions of men like Horatio Storer, whose efforts to medicalize pregnancy and criminalize abortion continue to inform that deadlocked debate, and who arguably established the rhetorical architecture pro-lifers still use today.
