American Medical Association
14 quotes
Biography
"We are issuing this joint statement to highlight the important role that physicians, pharmacists and health systems play in being just stewards of health care resources during times of emergency and national disaster. We are aware that some physicians and others are prophylactically prescribing medications currently identified as potential treatments for COVID-19 (e.g., or hydroxychloroquine, ) for themselves, their families, or their colleagues; and that some pharmacies and hospitals have been purchasing excessive amounts of these medications in anticipation of potentially using them for COVID-19 prevention and treatment. We strongly oppose these actions. At the same time, we caution hospitals, health systems, and individual practitioners that no medication has been FDA-approved for use in COVID-19 patients, and there is no incontrovertible evidence to support of medications for COVID-19. Stockpiling these medications—or depleting supplies with excessive, anticipatory orders—can have grave consequences for patients with conditions such as or if the drugs are not available in the community. The health care community must collectively balance the needs of patients taking medications on a regular basis for an existing condition with new prescriptions that may be needed for patients diagnosed with COVID-19. Being just stewards of limited resources is essential."
"During the period from 1840 to 1880, abortion became much more widely practiced and visible than it had been before, chiefly among upper-class Protestant women. During this same period, doctors-particularly through the newly formed American Medical Association-came to dominate the process of abortion legislation in a virtual crusade to outlaw the practice at all stages of pregnancy. The doctors’ rallying cry was a moral claim about fetal life, which perhaps stemmed from their knowledge that the quickening distinction had no basis in science. The motivations behind the physicians crusade, though, surely were more numerous and probably included: the desire to eliminate their nonprofessional competition; the drive to develop a legal code of ethics to further the process of professionalization; the desire to attain status as an important policymaking group; the desire to promote racial purity by fighting the increase in abortion among wealthy, white women; and the tendency to perpetuate a paternalistic social order that pushed women into the childbearing role. The latter two goals likely resulted simply from physicians being members of a society and class that shared certain views of women and minorities."
"The American Medical Association (AMA) was established in 1847 and began organizing opposition to lay healers and herbalists who provided medical care. Herbalists competed with physicians for patients and were believed by the physicians to be incompetent."
"To better understand racial injustice in the anti-abortion movement, remember that American hospitals barred the admission of African Americans both in terms of practice and as patients. And, the American Medical Association (AMA) barred women and Black people from membership. The AMA, founded in 1847, refused to admit Black doctors, informing them, “You come from groups and schools that admit women and that admit irregular practitioners.” For this reason, Black doctors formed the National Medical Association in 1895."
"The development of nineteenth century medical ethics seems to parallel the legal principles of Blackstone. Very influential during the early nineteenth century was Thomas Percival's Medical Ethics in which the following was written: "To extinguish the first spark of life is a crime of the same nature, both against our maker and society, as to destroy an infant, a child, or a man. '" These views explain in part the condemnation of abortion as the destruction of "human life" by the American Medical Association at its 1859 annual meeting."
"When the medical establishment undertook a campaign against abortion in the second half of the nineteenth century, its very vehemence served as a further indication of the prevalence of illegal abortions. In 1857 the American medical Association (AMA) initiated a formal investigation of the frequency of abortion. Seven years later the AMA offered a prize for the best popular antiabortion tract. Medical attacks on abortion grew in number and virulence until, by the 1870s, both professional and popular journals were virtually saturated with the issue. Physicians bemoaned the widespread lay acceptance of abortion before quickening; in order to break that sympathy, they adopted a new vocabulary that described abortion in terms designed to shock and repel, such as “antenatal infanticide.” Physicians attempted to frighten women away from abortion by emphasizing its dangers. Their common assertion that there was “no” safe abortion may have betrayed ignorance, but more likely it was an exaggeration justified by what they believed was a higher moral purpose. Yet occasionally even antiabortion doctors allowed the truth to slip out, revealing despite themselves why their campaign remained ineffective. It is such a simple and comparatively safe matter for a skillful and aseptic operator to interrupt an undesirable pregnancy at an early date,” wrote Dr. A. L. Benedict of Buffalo, New York, an opponent of abortion, “That the natural temptation is to comply with the request."
"Blackmun noted that the anti-abortion mood in the “late” nineteenth century was shared by the medical profession and that “the attitude of the profession may have played a significant role in the enactment of stringent criminal abortion legislation during that period.” He observed that the American Medical Association (AMA) appointed a Committee on Criminal Abortion in 1857 which in its report two years later deplored abortion and its frequency which it felt was due, first, to a wide- spread belief that the fetus was not alive until quickening; second, to the fact that doctors themselves were often supposed to be careless of fetal life; and, third, to the “grave defects” of both common and statute laws in recognizing the fetus and its inherent rights for civil purposes but in failing to recognize it, and denying it all protection, when “personally and as criminally affected.” He added that the AMA adopted its committee’s resolutions which protested against “such unwarrantable destruction of human life” and which called upon state legislatures to tighten their abortion laws."
"The Means–Blackmun narrative’s claim that protection of unborn children played no part in the enactment of increasingly restrictive 19th-century abortion laws blatantly defies a clear historical record. At its May 1859 meeting, for example, the American Medical Association (AMA) heard a report that rejected the “mistaken and exploded medical dogma” that the unborn child has no “independent and actual existence...as a living being.” The AMA unanimously adopted a resolution that condemned the “unwarrantable destruction of human life”38 and “the slaughter of countless children” and sought “the zealous co-operation of the various state Medical Societies” in pressing for laws prohibiting abortion, “at every period of gestation,” except when necessary to save the mother’s life."
"Reagan's discussion of "dying declarations" makes particularly chilling reading: because the words of the dying are legally admissible in court, women on their deathbeds were informed by police or doctors of their imminent demise and harassed until they admitted to their abortions and named the people connected with them—including, if the woman was unwed, the man responsible for the pregnancy, who could be arrested and even sent to prison. In 1902 the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association endorsed the by then common policy of denying a woman suffering from abortion complications medical care until she "confessed"—a practice that, Reagan shows, kept women from seeking timely treatment, sometimes with fatal results. In the late 1920s some 15,000 women a year died from abortions."
"To avoid the social disaster of single motherhood, turn-of-the century physicians and women’s charity groups urged unwed women to bear their children in maternity homes. Some homes arranged for adoption of illegitimate infants; others insisted that the new mothers keep them. The Journal of the American Medical Association viewed these homes as a way “to combat the crime of induced abortion.” Yet many homes refused African American women. One African American physician established a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, in order to provide a place where unmarried African American women could deliver their babies and give them up for adoption instead of having abortions. The policies of unwed mother’s homes could be oppressive. Maternity homes expected mothers to repent and required them to stay long periods of time, perform domestic tasks and participate in religious services. State agencies and private charities required the women, whether keeping or giving up their newborns, to breast-feed for several months. Some women surely concluded that an abortion, though illegal, could be a simpler solution to a pregnancy out of wedlock. Regina Kunzel has found that many women in maternity homes had tried but failed to abort their pregnancies. One maternity home inmate gave her new friends at the home valuable information for the future; she described how to do their own abortions."
"”Roe” ultimately gives physicians, not pregnant women, the ability to determine whether and when abortion is warranted. In the nineteenth century, women of all social classes could legally procure abortion, often using herbal abortifacients. As “regular” physicians distinguished themselves from midwives and homeopaths, many lobbied state legislatures to criminalize induced abortion. Shortly after its formation in 1847, the American Medical Association (AMA) declared human life to begin at conception and not, as women apparently believed, at “quickening,” midway through gestation, when a woman first feels fetal movement in the womb. In taking an anti-abortion stance, physicians not only professionalized but moralized their practice through association with saving lives. By end of century, abortion was criminalized throughout the United States and recognized to be a medical issue. It is an historic irony that abortion was medicalized to restrict its practice, only to be legalized a century later precisely based on its status as medical procedure, a private matter between patient and doctor."
"The American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics states that “[a] physician, as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so, should not be a participant in a legally authorized execution.”"
"In Roe and Lawrence, the Court found facts more favorable to the proposed due process rights. In Roe, the Court found some support for an abortion right in the limited evidence of a trend toward legalization—a stronger trend toward legalization than anything the Glucksberg Court could find, but hardly an overwhelming one. The Court noted that “about one-third” of the states had recently changed their abortion laws to make them “less stringent.” The Roe Court also emphasized the official positions of American professional associations. For over 100 years, the American Medical Association maintained the position that abortion should generally be illegal and doctors should not participate in the procedure before finally changing its position in 1970 to support abortion.222 Similarly, in 1970 the American Public Health Association adopted new “Standards for Abortion Services” calling for abortion referral to be easily available, and the American Bar Association called for abortion to be largely unrestricted in the first twenty weeks of pregnancy. Though the Court did not explicitly rest its holding on these professional associations’ positions, they did support its reasoning, and the Court spent six pages of the majority opinion discussing them."
"Most states criminalized abortion at the time of Roe v Wade. Although abortion performed before ‘quickening’ had been legal at the nation’s founding (‘quickening’ refers to the time when the mother can first feel fetal movement), the American Medical Association, starting in the 1850s, promoted the criminalization of abortion, except to save the mother’s life (Greenhouse and Siegel 2035). Texas, the state whose law was challenged in Roe v Wade, made abortion criminal in 1854, and a majority of US states had similar laws at the time the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade (Roe v Wade 118 n.2; Doe v Bolton 181–82). Consequently, prior to the decision, illegal abortions were common in the United States, with estimates of 1,000,000 a year or ‘one to every four births’ (Calderone 950). The danger of the procedure differed by class. Many doctors ‘secretly performed abortions for women whom they knew and who could pay’, while other women were relegated to ‘unsafe circumstances’ (Garrow (1999) 834)."