Frederick J. Taussig

Frederick J. Taussig (1872–1943) was an American gynecologist and professor of clinical obstetrics at Washington University School of Medicine. In the 1930s he was an influential advocate of legalization of abortion.

Life and work

Frederick Taussig earned an A.B. at Harvard in 1893 and an M.D. at the Washington University School of Medicine (then called the St. Louis Medical College). He interned at the St. Louis City Hospital for Women and then at the Imperial and Royal Elizabeth Hospital in Vienna. In addition to the Barnard Free Skin and Cancer Hospital, Taussig saw patients at the Washington University Hospital, the St. Louis City Hospital, the St. Louis Maternity Hospital, the New Jewish Hospital, and the Barnes Hospital. Many of his research papers—concerning such subjects as abortion and cancer of the vulva, cervix and vagina—were based on observations at those hospitals. Robert Latou Dickinson wrote about the book that it "renders service that is fundamental." In the book he counseled his fellow physicians to be wary of women who exaggerate their difficulties in pregnancy in order to convince their doctors to give them a therapeutic abortion. Opponents of legalized abortion have concurred with this assessment; Marvin Olasky, the editor-in-chief of the Christian evangelical magazine World, has called Taussig's Abortion, Spontaneous and Induced "the most effective pro-abortion book of the 1930s."

By the 1930s Taussig had also changed his attitude toward women. Rather than advising doctors to expect deviousness from women as he had done in the 1910 volume, he drew contrasts between the skill of midwives and the clumsiness of doctors whose sharp instruments often caused perforations of the uterus. He wrote that the increase in injury and death because of perforations over the previous fifty years was largely the result of "the proportionate increase in abortions handled by doctors as against those handled by midwives."

Selected works

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