The Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion
Frederick N. Dyer
“…effectively exposes the lies, distortions, greed, and harm to women expressed by the 19th century physicians with a prescient and frightening clarity applicable today in the war against abortions…belongs in the library of any serious student of the history of abortion and its effects on American society.”—Byron C. Calhoun, MD, FACOG, FACS, MBA, President, American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists
From prepublication reviews...
“Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 abortion ruling was not only bad constitutional law. It was also erroneous in its treatment of nineteenth century abortion laws and the attitude of the medical profession toward abortion at that time. The Physician’s Crusade Against Abortion effectively sets the record straight. The book focuses on the efforts of Horatio Robinson Storer, the surgeon who initiated the movement which provides the title of the book. Dyer’s useful and important study, however, goes beyond the work of Dr. Storer and demonstrates that the nineteenth century physicians who crusaded against abortion recognized and insisted upon the right of the unborn child to protection. His analysis exposes the tendentious character of the Supreme Court’s historical summary in Roe v. Wade.”
—Charles E. Rice, J.D., LL.M., J.S.D.
Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Notre Dame
“Dr Dyer’s valuable account of the physicians’ campaign for restriction of the abortion law in the nineteenth century shows that, contrary to the claim of many other historians, a central object of the campaign, and of the laws it inspired, was protection of the unborn child.”
—John Keown, M.A., D.PHIL., PH.D.
Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics
Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University
“Frederick Dyer is the world’s leading authority on the amazing and heroic Dr. Horatio Storer, whose physicians’ crusade against abortion is the topic and the title of Dyer’s comprehensive and well-documented book. All physicians and right-to-life activities would benefit from this superb biographical treatment of Dr. Storer and other medical men steeped in and inspired by the best Hippocratic tradition.”
—Eugene F. Diamond, M.D.
Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, Loyola University
Read Catholic journalist and commentator Matt C. Abbott’s online review, with quotes from the author at The Conservative Voice.
Contents
Foreword
Fervent Physician Pleas for the Unborn
Early Medical Opposition
“Quackery and Abortion” and Other Factors Leading to Storer's Crusade.
Storer's Crusade Begins
War Between the Medical Journals
Newspaper Abortion Advertisements, Bigelow's Treachery
Storer's Articles and the AMA Report
Gardner's Popular Article, Hale's How-to Manual
Storer's Prize-Winning Essay
Hale's Treatise and “Great Crime”
Butler's “Infantiphobia,” Fallout from Why Not?
Storer's and Others' Addresses
Protestant Efforts Against Abortion
Is It I?, Pallen, Allen, and Others
Storer's New Book and New Journal
Bishop Coxe, Archbishop Spalding, and Hodge's Encore
Popular Books Condemning Abortion
Physician Abortionists
Newspapers Briefly Join the Crusade
Physicians of Both Sexes Join the Crusade
A Proposal to Control Justifiable Abortion
Markham's Treatise and the Chicago Times Expose
A Call for Abolishment of Laws Against Abortion
Frequency of Criminal Abortion-What Decrease?
Protests Against “Race Suicide”
Abortion Symposia and a Scottish View
Cushing's Womb Strike, Cattell's Crusade, and Sanders' “Birth”
More Condemnations of Abortion and Abortionists
Afterword, Bibliography, Notes, Index
October 2005, 368 pp., illustrated, clothbound and jacketed, ISBN 0-88135-378-7, $39.95
See also, Champion of Women and the Unborn
© 2010 Watson Publishing International LLC