Abortion

“As obstetrical departments instituted therapeutic abortion committees in the 1940s and 1950s, hospitals voluntarily took on a new role in enforcing the abortion laws and acted as an arm of the state (Reagan, 173). . . . Therapeutic abortion committees helped take legal abortion out of the hands of general practitioners and private, nonhospital-based practice, and place it in the control of hospital-based specialists in obstetrics (177). . . . The medical monitoring of therapeutic abortions is a manifestation of the rise of both conservative medical attitudes toward therapeutic abortion and McCarthyism within medicine” (180).