Samuel Taylor was a proto-typical mild mannered small town pharmacist in the mid-nineteenth century. 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–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.
