Why Not? A Book For Every Woman

Why Not? A Book for Every Woman is a controversial medical and moral tract by Horatio Robinson Storer (1830-1922), the American physician who led the mid-nineteenth century campaign to criminalize abortion in the United States. The book was published in 1866 and was central to the broader physicians’ crusade against abortion that ran through the 1860s and 1870s and produced the various state anti-abortion laws of the period.

Storer argued that abortion was both morally wrong and medically dangerous, and that the American Medical Association and the broader medical profession had a duty to lead public opinion toward the legal prohibition of the practice. The book was directed at women readers and combined medical argument with moral and religious appeals.

The physicians’ crusade that Storer led had notable influence on American law and culture across the second half of the nineteenth century. The book is now of interest primarily to historians of American medical, legal, and reproductive history. It represents a specific historical position that shaped American public policy for over a century before major revision in the late twentieth century.