A pro-life pioneer

On Nov. 6, 1839, Dr. Hugh Hodge gave an introductory lecture at the University of Pennsylvania to a hall full of medical students. As they carried out the obstetrician’s task of caring for pregnant women, he told them, they would be caring for mothers, but “we should not forget her offspring, in the various stages of its existence, from the moment of its conception to delivery, from birth to the full development of its physical and moral nature.”

Hodge meticulously laid out the evidence that a pre-born child in the womb is an independent human being from his mother; noted that in the physiological sense, a child in the womb is as independent as an infant at the breast; he carefully rebutted those who argued that a child in the womb does not have a soul until sometime after conception. Reading the lecture almost 200 years later it sounds, but for some archaic language, almost precisely like many pro-life apologetics presentations I have attended.

Hodge’s lecture was one of the first significant condemnations of abortion in medical terms. Today, the narrative that abortion activists push is that the legalization of abortion in the 1960s and 1970s was a rejection of religious dogma and a return to a science-based approach to medicine. The opposite is true. In his groundbreaking lecture, Hodge rejected the philosophical and religious view that the fetus is essentially “inanimate” until some point during pregnancy—and asserted that because science tells us when life begins, we can definitively conclude that abortion is murder.

“It is in vain to evade this conclusion,” Hodge stated. “As far as human investigation has gone, or probably ever will go, in penetrating the mysterious function of generation—as far as the light of reason or the torch of revelation has elucidated the subject—there can be no reasonable doubt, that human existence, corporeally and spiritually, commences not with the birth of the foetus and the first inspiration, but at conception; when the germs furnished by both parents are quickened into life.”

I first learned of Hodge’s pro-life advocacy from Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas in their essential book The Story of Abortion in America: A Street Level History, 1652-2022. Hugh’s father—also Hugh, and also a doctor—served as a military surgeon in the Revolutionary War, set up a medical practice in Philadelphia, and married Mary Blanchard, an orphan from Boston. They had five children; three died of yellow fever in the epidemics that swept the city. The father also died of complications of yellow fever in 1798, several years after his children. Death came often to the Hodge home.

The two surviving sons were Hugh Lenox Hodge, the “pioneering pro-life physician,” and Charles Hodge, the “pro-creation theologian who wrote three volumes of systematic theology still read in seminaries today.” (Charles would marry Benjamin Franklin’s great-granddaughter, Sarah Bache, and become one of America’s premier theologians and one of Charles Darwin’s greatest adversaries.)

After graduating from Princeton College and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Hugh took a job as a ship surgeon on the merchant ship Julius Caesar, sailing from New York to India. In India, he witnessed a deadly cholera epidemic and the grotesque Hindu practice of suttee, in which a widow is burned on the pyre of her husband. He also saw and survived the near sinking of the vessel on the return voyage. Following the voyage, Hodge worked at the Philadelphia Almshouse Hospital, where he dealt with severe poverty, typhus, and other diseases.

In 1828, he married Margaret Aspinwall, a member of a prominent New York family, and together they had seven children. His oldest son, Charles, died suddenly at age 9 of the “perforation of the bowel.” According to some sources, it was this death and the deaths of Eliza Sowers and her unborn child, killed by a surgical abortion in 1839, that moved Hodge to speak out about abortion. Sowers became pregnant by her married employer, was pressured to procure an abortion, and was butchered in the process. The story deeply affected Hugh.

Hodge’s 1939 introductory lecture—and his status as one of the earliest prominent medical voices condemning abortion as murder—helped lay the groundwork for the Physician’s Crusade against abortion, launched by Dr. Horatio Storer in 1857. Hodge’s lecture was published and reprinted in expanded form in 1854, disseminated widely, and shifted opinion in medical circles against abortion. As historian Daniel K. Williams put it in Defenders of the Unborn:

Prior to the early nineteenth century, a number of Protestant doctors convinced state legislatures that medical science proved that biological life began long before quickening, which meant, in their view, that abortion should be prohibited at any state of fetal development. By the end of the nineteenth century, legislatures in nearly every state had enacted laws that allowed abortion only in cases in which the procedure was required to save a woman’s life.

The life and work of Hugh Lenox Hodge is a brilliant example for pro-life Americans today, and all can take inspiration from the concluding remarks of the introductory lecture heard round the country. “In this glorious work I bid you prosper,” he told the students. “Your rewards may not be riches and honour, but they will be more valuable and enduring, arising from the smiles of an approving conscience, and the blessing of that Being who has pronounced the severest curse on the crime of murder.”