Admittedly, Dr. Horatio R. Storer is not a name that tends to trip from one’s tongue when someone asks who was a major mover and shaker in the early anti-choice movement. For that matter, it unfortunately isn’t common knowledge anymore that abortion was a right under common law previous to Storer’s ranting.

On this, we should start with those common law roots. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, abortions – as we call them today – were considered a part of domestic life. Back then the term abortion was reserved for late-term miscarriages. Conception was considered a “blocking” of menstruation and was often treated with herbal and later, commercial drugs.

Late-term was defined as the period after the “quickening” and birth (or miscarriage.) Quickening was the point at which the woman could feel the movement of the fetus within her. Restoring the menses after this point was unacceptable, but was a domestic practice up until movement was perceived. By the 1840’s, in spite of laws created to prevent or at least curb it, commercial sales of abortifacient chemical compounds were booming.

Then in 1857, the newly formed American Medical Association began a crusade against abortion – or more accurately, against women. Using abortion as a hot topic, the AMA truly wanted to corner the market for men in medicine. A secondary issue was concerns over racial purity in the growing United States. Enter Dr. Horatio R. Storer, and his rhetoric.

Wanting to preserve a white protestant majority in the states, Storer began the cry against abortion. Many middle and upper class white protestant women were controlling the size of their families while women from catholic and “colored” families were not. So women should do their duty, and increase the white protestant population, according to him.

Women of the time were campaigning for a single standard in sexual morality – abstinence before marriage, monogamy, and moderation in sexual activity in marriage. Voluntary motherhood was one of their slogans, however women never campaigned for abortion. To Storer this didn’t matter. His battle cries claimed that abortion was just as immoral as men visiting prostitutes.

As for the term “quickening” that was used by women in self-diagnosis of their own conditions, Storer destroyed that as well. Claiming reproduction for science – and male doctors and obstetricians – was the end result, as well as the degradation of age-old means women had used to determine what stage of pregnancy they were in. Here are the roots of the current religious claims of life at conception – from a doctor, not a theologian. Another claim to fame for Storer is the fact that he claimed abortion was infanticide.

So state laws prohibiting abortion at any stage of pregnancy were enacted in the mid to late 1800’s – the “Comstock Law” passed in 1873 placing birth control and abortion under the category of antiobscenity legislation. From the rhetoric of one man, and the desire of the AMA to delegitimate their competition, women lost what had been a common law right – the right to control their own fertility.