In 1883 newspapers across the United States ran front-page stories describing the discovery of hundreds of unborn children buried in the cellar of a Philadelphia abortionist. Headlines did not employ euphemisms like medical waste or health code violations but spoke candidly instead of skulls, bones, and what judges and journalists alike called murder. Nearly a century later, when thousands of aborted fetuses were discovered in a storage container in Los Angeles, coverage looked very different. Major newspapers emphasized investigation and regulation, avoided concrete description, and relegated the story to the inner pages. Why two discoveries so similar in substance were treated so differently—and what that shift reveals about how Americans learned to see abortion—is the question that opens The Story of Abortion in America.
This opening challenge presses against one of the most common assumptions in contemporary discourse: that abortion has always occupied roughly its present place within American life, and that opposition to it represents a belated, reactionary intrusion. Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas contest that historical memory by arguing that abortion’s cultural normalization was not inevitable, but the result of a long process of linguistic abstraction and institutional retreat. What now appears morally ordinary, they argue, once required sustained cultural work to become so.
To make their case, Olasky and Savas employ a narrative method that draws on episodes from across American history rather than abstract theory alone. They repeatedly return to concrete stories—legal disputes, journalistic exposés, and personal scandals—in which abortion functioned as a means of concealing sexual transgression or preserving social standing. In these accounts, abortion often appears not as an isolated medical decision but as a tool used by respected or powerful figures to erase inconvenient evidence of illicit relationships. By tracing such episodes across centuries, the authors show that abortion’s cultural role has long been intertwined with patterns of moral evasion, institutional protection, and selective silence.
This narrative approach is paired with careful attention to legal and social context. Olasky and Savas begin with early common-law treatment of abortion, showing that it operated within a moral framework that assumed communal responsibility rather than radical individual autonomy. Legal ambiguity did not imply moral indifference; abortion was widely understood as a serious social wrong even when enforcement was uneven. That moral understanding was reinforced, rather than undermined, by nineteenth-century journalism, which routinely described abortion at what the authors call a street level—concrete, public, and morally legible. Over time, however, institutional expectations surrounding pregnancy weakened. As responsibility shifted away from fathers, families, churches, and communities, public moral language moved from street-level description to what the authors term a suite level—more abstract, technical, and administratively managed. Within that framework, abortion could be reframed as a private solution to a private problem rather than a communal failure requiring communal response. The history that follows is therefore not merely about abortion itself but about how a culture’s language and institutions together shape what it is able—or unwilling—to see.
Compassion Versus Abortion
One of the most illuminating chapters in the volume, “Compassion vs. Abortion,” exemplifies this argument in concrete form. Olasky and Savas center their account on figures such as Philadelphia physician Andrew Nebinger, whose opposition to abortion during the period between 1865 and 1876 was inseparable from a life marked by extraordinary care for the poor, the sick, widows, and orphans. Nebinger abandoned lucrative medical practice to serve those unable to pay, worked extensively within charitable institutions, and advocated for public health reforms during epidemics, all while speaking forcefully against abortion as a grave moral wrong. His example undermines the modern caricature of pro-life advocacy as “pro-birth” rather than genuinely compassionate.
The chapter also exposes the fragility of moral clarity once institutional courage erodes. While doctors like Nebinger spoke plainly, many clergy hesitated, fearing social backlash or offense to respectable congregations. Sermons that did address abortion directly were often criticized as too blunt, revealing how euphemism and pastoral caution displaced moral instruction. In this way, the chapter functions as a microcosm of the book’s larger claim: Abortion expanded not because compassion increased but because shared responsibility and moral candor diminished.
Strengths
One of the chief strengths of the book is that it is convincing in both style and substance. Olasky and Savas do not merely assert a thesis; they demonstrate it through sustained engagement with journalism, legal records, and institutional history. Their narrative method gives the argument cumulative force, allowing patterns to emerge organically rather than being imposed abstractly. The book is especially strong where it draws on nineteenth-century reporting and court records, areas in which the authors’ use of primary sources is both careful and persuasive. The volume is well organized, moving chronologically while maintaining thematic coherence, and its conceptual vocabulary—particularly the distinction between street-level and suite-level description—is clearly introduced and consistently applied. Judged on its own terms, the book succeeds in accomplishing its stated purpose: showing how moral vision is historically formed and how cultural acceptance emerges through habituation, abstraction, and institutional retreat.
The book also makes a meaningful contribution to cultural and moral history by reframing abortion not primarily as a legal or ideological issue but as a problem of moral imagination shaped by language and institutions. Rather than duplicating existing legal or sociological histories, Olasky and Savas complement them by attending to explanatory factors that are often neglected. Their extensive footnotes and wide-ranging bibliography reflect careful scholarship and sustained engagement with primary sources, lending credibility to a project that spans several centuries. In this respect, the book speaks directly to contemporary debates about narrative framing, moral language, and the limits of purely legal explanations for cultural change.
A Perceived Limitation
One perceived limitation of the book is that its sustained focus on language and moral abstraction can, at times, appear to carry more explanatory weight than other contributing factors receive. While Olasky and Savas convincingly demonstrate that shifts in description, reporting practices, and institutional behavior played a significant role in abortion’s cultural normalization, they do not always engage at equal depth factors such as economic pressure, changing sexual norms, and broader social transformations. This reflects the book’s intentional scope rather than a failure to accomplish its aim. Olasky and Savas press a focused argument about moral perception and cultural formation rather than claiming exhaustive explanatory power. As such, this should be understood as a “little-w” weakness—one of emphasis rather than execution.
Recommendation
From a reader’s standpoint, The Story of Abortion in America is not an easy book to absorb emotionally. The authors do not spare the reader from disturbing historical detail, and the cumulative effect of confronting both the physical realities of abortion and the linguistic strategies used to obscure them can be deeply unsettling. The book exposes not only the act itself but what the authors present as a broader pattern of moral evasion—efforts to sanitize, euphemize, and administratively manage practices that resist such treatment. For this reason, the book rewards careful, deliberate reading rather than rapid consumption. Readers with tender consciences may find it wise to approach the book in stages, allowing time to process the material rather than attempting to move through it quickly.
Taken as a whole, The Story of Abortion in America will be of greatest benefit to readers who want to understand abortion as a cultural and moral phenomenon rather than solely a political or legal controversy. Scholars, students, pastors, educators, and thoughtful lay readers will find the book especially valuable for its historical depth and its attention to language, institutions, and moral formation. Those seeking a policy manual or narrowly legal analysis may find the book less immediately satisfying, but readers willing to engage the historical processes that shape moral perception will find it both challenging and illuminating.
©Erik Warren O’Dell. All Rights Reserved.
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Erik Warren O’Dell
Erik Warren O’Dell is a Christian educator, writer, and curriculum developer in the classical humanities tradition based in the Houston, Texas area. He holds an MA in Theological Studies from Westminster Seminary California (2018) and teaches and develops homeschool curriculum from a confessional Reformed perspective. He also leads a church-history-as-apologetics Sunday school series at Christ Presbyterian Church, where he worships with his wife, Jessica. His work focuses on helping students and readers think clearly, historically, and faithfully about Christianity in a skeptical age.
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