ABSTRACT
Historian James C. Mohr has demonstrated persuasively that in the mid-nineteenth century the "graduates of the country's better medical schools" and the members of the newly established (1847) American Medical Association led the campaign to outlaw abortion in America. Mohr's study presents important revisions in understanding of traditional resistances to the practice of abortion. The "regulars" moved against it, he argues, in order to use state power to enhance their control over the practice of medicine by those who lacked their credentials. The medical indications that Taussig described may be said to have compelled the physician to perform an abortion, but only after other avenues of care had proved ineffective. Therapeutic abortion was most strongly indicated during medical emergency when the mother's life was clearly in jeopardy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the practice of abortion was regarded by the general public as a criminal activity regardless of the medical indications for the interruption of pregnancy.
