Abortions

“Physicians and historians believe that hospitals gained authority over the decisions and practices of physicians only recently, during the 1970s and 1980s . . . Yet therapeutic abortion committees show that hospitals gained control over physicians and medical practice at a much earlier date. Therapeutic abortion committees brought physicians’ practices under hospital scrutiny and control over thirty years earlier than generally assumed. . . . By 1954, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAHP) issued standards that required consultation for only three operations – all of them concerning reproduction. First-time cesarean sections, curettages or any procedure in which a ‘pregnancy may be interrupted,’ and sterilization required consultation. No other operations required review” (Reagan, 190-191). . . . Abortion was institutionalized in hospitals in two interrelated structures: the therapeutic abortion committee [for middle-class white women] and the septic abortion ward [for lower-class, especially black women injured and infected from illegal abortions] (214).