Horatio Robinson Storer

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. 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 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 instinc

As a result, the AMA petitioned the legislatures of the states and territories to strengthen their laws against elective abortions.

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.

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