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== Anti-abortion activism and views ==
In 1857, Storer started what [[NPR]] calls the "physicians' crusade against abortion". In 1860, governors of every state in the U.S. received the letter from the recently-established AMA.<ref name="NPR 2022">{{cite news|last1=Abdeltath|first1=Rund|last2=Arablouei|first2=Ramtin|last3=Caine|first3=Julie|last4=Kaplan-Levenson|first4=Laine|last5=Wu|first5=Lawrence|last6=Yvellez|first6=Victor|last7=Miner|first7=Casey|last8=Sangweni|first8=Yolanda|last9=Steinberg|first9=Anya|last10=George|first10=Deborah|title=Before Roe: The Physicians' Crusade|url=https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099795225/before-roe-the-physicians-crusade|work=Throughline|publisher=NPR|access-date=July 26, 2022}}</ref> Storer [[ghostwrote]] a letter, supposedly from the president of the AMA, in which he stated that the AMA opposed abortion. Storer used the language of morality, writing: "The evil to society of this crime is evident from the fact that it's instances in this country are now to be counted by hundreds of thousands. In reality, there is a little difference between the immorality by which a man forsakes his home for an occasional visit to a house of prostitution that he may preserve his wife from the chance of pregnancy, and the immorality by which that wife brings herself willfully to destroy the living fruit of her womb. The child is alive from the moment of conception."<ref name="NPR 2022"/> The letter was pivotal to what historians call the "physicians' crusade against abortion", and Storer was making a few key arguments for why abortion should be illegal across the country. He introduced a new idea that life began at conception. Until then, people generally agreed that life began when a woman could actually feel life move inside her at quickening. Storer campaigned on a moral argument that also tapped into the racial fears of the moment that would eventually inspire a [[pseudoscientific]] field of "racial improvement and planned breeding of the population."<ref name="NPR 2022"/>
The racial fears would inspire [[forced sterilization]] programs to decrease certain populations, but Storer's anti-abortion campaign was trying to increase other populations by focusing on [[Protestant]] white women. Elite Protestant white women were often the ones seeking abortions. The birth rate for Protestant white women had been declining over the course of the 19th century and so he had fears of what was commonly referred to as "[[race suicide]]" of the [[Anglo-Saxon]] replenishing itself fast enough to keep up with the swells of new immigrants to the United States.<ref name="NPR 2022"/> The common narrative became that "white women to use their loins" because of the "blackening and the browning" of United States. His concern was that that the freeing of black slaves and the influx of Chinese immigrants would mean the death of the country's [[white race]], which he understood to mean Anglo-Saxon people.<ref>{{cite book|last=Poole|first=W. Scott|year=2009|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pWYqgsRLXykC|title=Satan in America: The Devil We Know |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield Publishers|page=86|isbn=978-0742561717|access-date=July 26, 2022|via=Google Books}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last=Wilson|first=Chris|date=2 November 2020|title=Nostalgia, Entitlement and Victimhood: The Synergy of White Genocide and Misogyny|journal=Terrorism and Political Violence|volume=34 |issue=8 |publisher=Routledge|pages=1810–1825|doi=10.1080/09546553.2020.1839428|s2cid=228837398 |postscript=. Storer is cited at p. 4.}}</ref>
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