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6 Abortion Regret THE PHYSICIANS’ ANTIABORTION CAMPAIGN At the 1857 meeting of the Suffolk District Medical Society, Dr. Hora- tio Storer alerted the Boston physicians in the audience to the alarming fre- quency of induced abortions among respectable married Protestant ­women in the city as he observed in his medical practice. Seeking to mobilize his peers to end what he would soon characterize as the “slaughter of count- less ­ children now perpetrated in our midst,”27 he persuaded both the local society and the recently founded American Medical Association (AMA) to establish committees for the purpose of investigating the ­ matter of crim- inal abortion with a view “­toward its general suppression.”28 At its 1859 annual meeting, the AMA’s appointed Committee on Crimi- nal Abortion presented its report (which Storer authored) condemning the “wanton and murderous destruction” of the unborn. In a series of unani- mously ­adopted resolutions, the AMA formally declared it the duty of its members “as physicians, and as good and true men” to “publicly . . . ​enter an earnest and solemn protest against such unwarrantable destruction of ­ human life” and to “pres­ent this subject to the attention of the . . . ​legislative assemblies . . . ​with the prayer that the laws by which the crime of procur- ing abortion . . . ​ may be revised.”29 Moving forward, the AMA remained firmly committed to the antiabor- tion cause, and as Mohr writes, “the vigorous efforts of Amer­i­ca’s regular physicians would prove in the long run to be the single most impor­tant ­ factor in altering the ­ legal policies ­ toward abortion in this country.”30 Reflecting their determination, by the end of the ­ century all states had criminalized abortion from the inception of pregnancy, ­unless a doctor certified that the procedure was necessary to save the life of a pregnant ­woman. The logical question, of course, is: What compelled Storer and his col- leagues to take up the antiabortion cause? According to Mohr and Luker, authors of classic works on the subject, a key motivating ­factor was the desire of physicians to upgrade their professional status. In large mea­sure, this concern was prompted by the proliferation of lay healers in the early de­cades of the 19th ­ century. ­ These included, by way of example, botanic prac­ti­tion­ers, natu­ral bonesetters, and homeopaths. Not only did ­these “irregular healers” increase the competition for patients, but rooted in the demo­cratic and antimonopolistic spirit of the Jacksonian era, they also regarded “the medical profession as a bulwark of privilege, and . . . ​­adopted a position hostile to both its therapeutic tenets and its social aspirations.”31 With some success, they accordingly appealed to state lawmakers to repeal