Abortion Research or Torture Most Cruel: Davenport Hooker, the unborn and psychology

Psychology has a past steeped in experiments which would never meet current standards of behavior. Four eminent, widely quoted and revered members of the profession have been touted for their work; Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, John Watson and, the least known to most psychologists, Davenport Hooker. All of them violated our ethical standards today and, probably, when they were conducted.

Hooker, a prominent non-MD medical researcher at the University of Pittsburgh from the 1930–1960s, is as a man who pushed the limits of research and who delved into the unethical in the extreme. His was not work aimed at the behavior of fully developed children, but the unfortunate living remains of aborted or miscarried fetuses. The means by which they obtained these fetuses is questionable since it involved, in at least 149 cases, major surgeries on Hooker’s behalf on unsuspecting women.

An excerpt from the Time, May 2, 1938 article is included here: