Vanity and selfishness. Aborted fetuses, the 1860s antiabortionist crusader J. T. Cook claimed, “premature martyrs to woman’s vanity, woman’s selfishness, and woman’s inhumanity, have gone up to the great white throne with no earthly record of their sacrifice, save the painted, fleeting and fading beauty of vain and fashionable mothers!”38 Storer agreed, opining that, sadly, women who had abortions were “under that strange and masterful thralldom of fashion.”
