When I did research for my mystery novel and legal case about abortion in 1887 San Francisco, I discovered that the big “tidal wave” of change in the United States to prevent abortions in all the states was, as it is today, being directly influenced by the Christian Church, especially the Catholics, who are vehemently against abortions.
In fact, I chose a main character from the leadership of this anti-abortion crowd who was most influential and was President of the fledgling American Medical Association. Horatio Robinson Storer, a Roman Catholic, who once performed hysterectomies (please note the prefix “hyster”), as he did thousands of these surgeries on women who had “unwanted pregnancies, often as married women,” and then became “hysterical” so that, he believed, they needed to lose their means of procreation in order to repair their minds.
In other words, they had to lose their ability to reproduce because they were mentally ill! Storer even put his own wife into an insane asylum when she believed she had too many kids with him.
Storer had a Harvard Medial School degree, and he led the group of physicians against abortion mainly to stop the occupation of midwifery, as this had been the main system of aborting unwanted fetuses before this time, and the men had very little input concerning this matter.
But Storer and his group rampaged into Washington D. C. and got the legislation passed to stop abortions by and for women, and to get the business of live birth back into the hospitals where the doctors worked. It became a bigger and more profitable business!
In fact, you could compare it to the funeral industry after laws were changed to prevent families from taking care of their own dead so as to create a new business model for profit. They changed the name of the room where families kept their dead from the Nineteenth Century “parlor,” and moved that word to the funeral home, and the citizens’ home became the “living room.”
So, one would imagine, the same profit enterprise is behind this latest 2022 Supreme Court move to ban “non religious” abortions. So the business model can return to the coffers of the churches and to the (mostly Christian) states where they rule to political forces locally at in the state legislative processes.
Here’s one of the documents I used to chisel Dr. Storer for my historical mystery novel Dark Justice, Clara Shortridge Foltz Portia of the Pacific Historical Mysteries.
