Horatio Storer: Difference between revisions

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]]", in which the [[Anglo-Saxon]] population was not 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 needed to “use their loins” to combat the "blackening and the browning" of the 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>

 

 

In an 1865 essay for the AMA, Storer wrote that "upon [white women's] loins depends the future destiny of the nation."<ref>{{cite web|last1=Samuels|first1=Alex|last2=Potts|first2=Monica|date=July 25, 2022|url=https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-fight-to-ban-abortion-is-rooted-in-the-great-replacement-theory/|title=How The Fight To Ban Abortion Is Rooted In The 'Great Replacement' Theory|website=FiveThirtyEight|access-date=July 26, 2022|quote=It took time for the anti-abortion movement to attract supporters, and unlike today, religious groups were not originally an active part of it. Still, momentum built as a small but influential number of physicians began arguing that licensed male doctors — as opposed to female midwives — should care for women throughout the reproductive cycle. In the late 1850s, one of the leaders of the nascent anti-abortion movement, a surgeon named Horatio Robinson Storer, began arguing that he didn’t want the medical profession to be associated with abortion. He was able to push the relatively new American Medical Association to support his cause, and soon they were working to delegitimize midwives and enforce abortion bans. In an 1865 essay issued by order of the AMA, Storer went so far as to say of white women that 'upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.'}}</ref> To help keep the white race dominant in the United States and to lend legitimacy to the AMA, Storer persuaded it to form the Committee on Criminal Abortion and to promote sterilization of what it deemed to be undesirable individuals. In 1859, the Committee Report was presented at the AMA meeting in [[Louisville, Kentucky]]. Accepted by the AMA, it included this 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, [[wikt:imbrued|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 the Great|Herod]] [the Great, and] [[Burke and Hare]]; of the public sentiment which [[wikt:palliates|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 earlier colonies had governed abortion according to [[English common law]], which largely did not recognize a state interest in pregnancy or abortion until [[quickening]]. It occurred sometimes as late as the 25th week of pregnancy, which was left solely to the pregnant woman to determine. The [[common law]] was largely employed to protect the interests of the woman, not the [[fetus]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-amicus-curiae-brief-in-dobbs-v-jackson-womens-health-organization-(september-2021)|title=Brief for ''Amici Curiae'' American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians in Support of Respondants|date=September 2021|pages=5–14|access-date=July 27, 2022|via=American Historical Association}}</ref>