Horatio Storer, a white physician, considers women’s desire to terminate their pregnancies to be a form of "insanity." He forms the Committee on Criminal Abortion as part of the American Medical Association's (AMA) strategy for medical standardization, with the intention of ensuring the medical profession will not be associated with the termination of pregnancies.

Demonizing abortion is also a strategy for distinguishing the emerging professional medical field from the wide array of folk medicines and healers traditionally responsible for reproductive care. The AMA also originates the common white supremacist talking point that falling birth rates can be attributed to the termination of pregnancies.