The Physicians' Crusade Against Abortion.

Few, if any, academic works have had the impact on abortion of James Mohr's 1978 book, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 18001900. It is routinely and erroneously cited as proof positive that the 19th-century "Physicians' Crusade against abortion" had nothing to do with unborn babies and much to do with two other considerations: physicians' concern about the safety of abortion for women and their attempts to eliminate quacks and squeeze out competition from midwives. Since, it was argued, physician-induced abortion was no longer dangerous in the 1970s and since medical regulation had eliminated the quacks, there was no reason to retain the laws against abortion.

Although wrong about the reasons these physicians crusaded against abortion, Mohr and several other historians correctly recognized one key result of the Physicians' Crusade. This was the passage of stringent laws against abortion in nearly every state and territory. These remained in effect with little change in most states until overturned in Roe v. Wade.

During the deliberations leading up to that 1973 decision, it was also claimed (principally in two law review articles authored by Professor Cyril Means, Jr.) that these laws were passed to protect women from a no-longer-dangerous operation. It was also claimed that concern for the unborn child was not an important factor underlying the enactment of these laws. A majority of justices accepted these false claims and all the state laws the physicians had lobbied to have enacted were overturned.

Mohr's book, however, has proven extremely important in popularizing a serious misunderstanding about the motivation behind the anti-abortion laws of the 19th century. Yet, as I show in both my first book, Champion of Women and the Unborn: Horatio Robinson Storer, M.D., and in the forthcoming The Physicians' Crusade against Abortion, Mohr's own volume contains evidence to show that he understood that the motives of Dr. Storer and hundreds of other physicians were grounded in a deep concern for unborn children. This is not some dry in-house academic debate: Abortion in America has played, and continues to play, a huge role in shaping the way policy makers and academics understand why the stringent anti-abortion statutes were passed.

One instance where Mohr's book came into play was the 1989 Supreme Court case involving a Missouri abortion law. Many on both sides of the issue pondered whether the High Court might use Webster v. Reproductive Health Services to significantly cut back, even overturn Roe. (The Court did neither.)

A number of friend-of-the-court briefs were filed by groups who opposed Missouri's law. One brief, signed by 281 professional historians, acknowledged that "physicians were the principal nineteenth-century proponents of laws to restrict abortion," but denied that concern for the unborn was one of their reasons. The brief asserted that the life of the fetus "became a central issue in American culture only in the late twentieth century."

What were the physicians' motivations, according to the historians' brief? They asserted that physicians were concerned about protecting the health of women, regulating the medical profession, keeping women in traditional roles, and preventing the descendants of immigrants from becoming dominant in the population. The historians argued that since these reasons now were obsolete or not credible, the Court should reaffirm the constitutional right to abortion it had announced in Roe v. Wade. The brief relied heavily on Mohr's book.