Horatio Storer (nonfiction)

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Horatio Robinson Storer (February 27, 1830 – September 18, 1922) was an American physician, numismatist, and anti-abortion activist.

Storer was born in Boston, Massachusetts and attended the Boston Latin School, Harvard College, and the Boston (Harvard) Medical School. After obtaining his M.D. in 1853 he traveled to Europe and spent a year studying with James Young Simpson at Edinburgh.[1] He began medical practice in Boston in 1855 with emphasis on obstetrics and gynecology.

In 1857, he started the "physicians' crusade against abortion" both in Massachusetts and nationally, when he persuaded the American Medical Association (AMA) to form a Committee on Criminal Abortion. The Committee Report was presented at the AMA meeting in Louisville, Kentucky in 1859 and accepted by the Association. It included the passage:

If we have proved the existence of fetal life before quickening has taken place or can take place, and by all analogy and a close and conclusive process of induction, its commencement at the very beginning, at conception itself, we are compelled to believe unjustifiable abortion always a crime.

And now words fail. Of the mother, by consent or by her own hand, imbrued with her infant's blood; of the equally guilty father, who counsels or allows the crime; of the wretches, who by their wholesale murders far out-Herod Burke and Hare; of the public sentiment which palliates, pardons, and would even praise this, so common, violation of all law, human and divine, of all instinct, of all reason, all pity, all mercy, all love,—we leave those to speak who can.

Prior to the 1820s, most American states -- and the colonies beforehand -- governed abortion according to English common law, which largely did not recognize a state interest in pregnancy or abortion until quickening (sometimes as late as the 25th week of pregnancy), the occurrence of which was left solely to the pregnant woman to determine. Even then, the common law was largely employed to protect the interests of the woman, not the fetus.[2]

Storer believed that abortion was morally wrong. But he also "believed that abortions were endangering what he saw as the ideal America: a society of white Protestants in which women adhered strictly to their proper 'duties' -- marriage and childbearing." He feared that the birthrates of recent immigrants, predominantly Catholic, would overwhelm the hegemony of white Protestants in New England, for which he in part blamed married Protestant women for not producing enough children. He equated marriage without a focus on fertility as "'nothing less than legalized prostitution.'"[3]

Storer's campaign to codify criminal prohibition of abortion employed "a cascade of alarming statistics that he claimed showed an epidemic of abortions and its impact on native-born fertility." His "statistical methods began with poor data and were rife with erroneous assumptions."[4]

As a result of Storer's efforts, the AMA petitioned the legislatures of the states and territories to strengthen their laws against elective abortions.[5]

By 1880 most states and territories had enacted such legislation. Although abortion continued, some women were dissuaded by these new laws and by physician persuasion.

In 1865, Storer won an AMA prize for his essay aimed at informing women about the moral and physical problems of induced abortion. It was published as Why Not? A Book for Every Woman. It was widely sold and many physicians distributed it to patients who requested abortion.

In 1869 Storer founded the Gynaecological Society of Boston, the first medical society devoted exclusively to gynecology, publish the first gynecology journal, the Journal of the Gynaecological Society of Boston.

Also in 1869, Storer, raised in a Unitarian family, became an Episcopalian. A decade later, he became a Roman Catholic.[6]

After his retirement from practice in 1872, he became an authority on, and a notable collector of, medallions of medical interest.

References

"Horatio Robinson Storer Papers 1859-1916". National Library of Medicine.
Brief for Amici Curiae American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), pp. 5-14.
Brief for Amici Curiae American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), p. 21-22.
Brief for Amici Curiae American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), p. 23.
"This 19th C. Pro-Life Hero Quietly Saved Millions of Lives - Including Your Own |". 23 February 2016.
"The Good Doctor: Horatio Robinson Storer". 10 December 2012.

Frederick N. Dyer, Champion of Women and the Unborn: Horatio Robinson Storer, M.D. Science History Publications, USA. 1999. Leslie Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine and the Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Chapter 2. James C. Mohr, "Storer, Horatio Robinson," American National Biography. John F. Quinn, "The Good Doctor," Crisis Magazine, 10 December 2012 [1] External links Horatio Storer website Works by or about Horatio Storer at Internet Archive

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