Samuel Taylor was a proto-typical mild mannered small town
pharmacist. A family man,
community leader, and life-long Methodist, he had a natural Midwestern aversion
to controversy. But when the
daughter of one of his customers was nearly poisoned by a dose of mail-order
abortifacient pills, he sprang into action.
He discovered that the abortifacient business was booming
all over the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century--and that it was an entirely unrestricted,
unregulated, and unmonitored industry.
Without the benefits of a government agency, an institutional largess,
or a corporate sponsor, he began a one-man educational campaign--first with his
fellow pharmacists, later expanding to physicians, and finally with state
legislators--to alert the public to the physical dangers and the moral liabilities
of the child-killing trade. Taylor
testified before the Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana legislatures--winning their
support for a ban on the sale of all chemical parricides and
abortifacients--and he drafted
model legislation that was approved by fourteen other states.
Taylor was a very ordinary man who utilized his very ordinary skills and resources to accomplish something quite extraordinary.
