Who was Marie Stopes?

hli.org/resources/who-was-marie-stopes/

Brian Clowes, PhD

Marie Carmichael Stopes was the United Kingdom’s answer to America’s Margaret Sanger.
Both women lived during the same era. Both were vocal eugenicists and birth control
pioneers in their respective nations during the 1920s and 1930s, and their writings show
that their views on eugenics and racial purity were identical. Most importantly, Marie
Stopes’ legacy has done just as much to spread birth control and abortion across the globe
as Sanger’s International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Marie Stopes was born in 1880 to parents of the privileged European idle class. Her father
Henry was an architect and her mother Charlotte was a renowned expert on Shakespeare,
as well as being the first female graduate of a Scottish university.

The Stopes family was very well off, and they traipsed all over Europe pursuing their
personal interests. The twin luxuries of time and money gave Marie the means to concoct
her bizarre theories about eugenics and parenthood.

Marie Stopes and Eugenics

Stopes was a eugenicist long before she was a birth controller. She was a life member of
the Eugenics Society and was a member of the Malthusian League. In 1921 she founded her
own Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress (CBC), and most of her
fortune was left to eugenics organizations.[1]

1/6
Two of the basic principles of the CBC were these:

“The haphazard production of children by ignorant, coerced, or diseased mothers is

profoundly detrimental to the race.”
“Many men and women should be prevented from procreating children at all, because
of their individual ill-health, or the diseased and degenerate nature of the offspring
that they may be expected to produce.”[2]

In order to put its philosophy into action,

the CBC located its birth control clinics in
poor and minority areas, just as Planned
Parenthood does now in the United States.
The first of these birth control clinics was
also the first of its kind in the United
Kingdom. It was named the London’s
Mother’s Clinic, and is still operating today.

In 1922, Stopes began to publish The Birth

Control News. Her emphasis was on
improving the race, and the motto of her
organization was “Babies in the Right
Place.” The slogan of The Birth Control News
was printed on a lantern: “Birth Control:
Joyous and Deliberate Motherhood, a Sure
Light in Our Racial Darkness.”

Stopes attended the Third Reich’s

International Congress for Population
Science in Berlin in 1935, two years after
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and
long after his racist and anti-Semitic views
had become well-known to the world.

Four years later, after Germany had annexed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia, she sent
a collection of her mediocre poems entitled “Songs for Young Lovers” to der Führer, along
with a fawning letter saying “Dear Herr Hitler; love is the greatest thing in the world, so will
you accept from me these [poems] that you may allow the young people of your nation to
have them?”[3]

In 1952 Stopes was involved in the organization of the International Planned Parenthood
Federation (IPPF), which was established and initially housed rent-free in the offices of the
Eugenics Society.

2/6
Stopes’ eugenicist views and hatred of the poor are well-documented. In 1919, she urged
the National Birth Rate Commission to support the mandatory sterilization of parents who
were diseased, prone to drunkenness or of “bad character.” She also demanded that the
“sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood be made an immediate possibility, indeed
made compulsory.”[4]

She also said, “Utopia could be reached in my life-time had I the power to issue inviolable
edicts…I would legislate compulsory sterilization of the insane, feebleminded…
revolutionaries…half-castes.”[5]

Stopes’ writings prove that she supported the practice of both positive eugenics (through
encouraging more children among the “fit”), and negative eugenics (through sterilization
and birth control among the “unfit”):

Stopes disapproved of all the “unfit weaklings and diseased individuals who threaten
the race” and “the less thrifty and conscientious who bred rapidly and produced
children weakened and handicapped by physical as well as mental warping and
weakness.”[6]
During World War I, she complained that “all the fine, clean strong young men…who
go out to be killed…have no sons to carry on the race, but the cowards and unhealthy
ones who remain behind can all have wives and children.”[7]
She also railed against a society that “allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the
thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the
community, to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped and
inferior infants.” She claimed, “We as a race slide at an ever increasing speed towards
the utter deterioration of our stock.”[7]
Perhaps most startlingly, she said that, if only the world would adopt her eugenic
vision, we would see an “entirely new type of human creature, stepping into a future
so beautiful, so full of the real joy of self-expression and understanding that we here
today may look upon our grandchildren and think almost that the gods have
descended to walk upon the earth.”[8]

Marie Stopes in Her Personal Life

At least Stopes was consistent in her application of her belief system — an amalgam of
idealism, elitism and eugenics — by applying it even to her own family.

3/6
She forced her son Harry to wear a skirt until he was eleven because she did not believe in
the “ugly and heating-in-the-wrong-places garments which most men are condemned to
wear,” and for the same reason forbade Harry to ride a bicycle. When poor Harry flouted
the principles of eugenics by marrying a near-sighted woman, Marie Stopes not only refused
to attend the wedding, she cut him out of her will. She said of Harry’s wife, the former Mary
Eyre Wallace:

She has an inherited disease of the eyes which not only makes her wear hideous glasses so
that it is horrid to look at her, but the awful curse will carry on and I have the horror of our
line being so contaminated and little children with the misery of glasses….Mary and Harry
are quite callous about both the wrong to their children, the wrong to my family and the
eugenic crime.[9]

Regardless of her ill-treatment of him, Harry Stopes-Roe is carrying on his mother’s work.
He is currently vice-president of the British Humanist Association. According to The
Guardian, “He now recognizes over-population as the most important practical moral
problem.”[10]

4/6
Harry’s mother clung to her eugenics philosophy long after the pseudo-science had been
thoroughly discredited. In 1956, two years before she died, Marie Stopes asserted that one-
third of British men should be forcibly sterilized, “starting with the ugly and unfit.”[11]

Stopes’ cruelty and self-centeredness was not limited to her poor son Harry. She had her
first marriage annulled due to her husband’s impotence, and hopped from bed to bed for
years. Like other “progressives” of her day and ours, she had little use for the family, the
Church, or the sanctity of human life. Self-fulfillment was her tawdry and inadequate god.

Marie Stopes’ Legacy

The abortion industry in particular and
liberalism in general have effectively
erased Stopes’ racism and hatred of the
poor from the collective memory of an
inattentive and uncaring public,
primarily because she is an historical
reflection of the latte-sipping Left. She
has been so thoroughly “rehabilitated”
that readers of the major British left-
wing newspaper The Guardian voted her
“Woman of the Millennium” in 1999.

The British elite class is working hard to

sanitize Stopes’ legacy, just as the
American elite are laboring to cleanse
Margaret Sanger’s. Beginning in
October 2008, Stopes appeared on one
of Great Britain’s 50-pence stamps. She
was chosen by an all-female, all-feminist committee to be one of six women pioneers in the
Royal Mail’s “Women of Distinction” collection.[12]

After thousands of outraged British citizens objected to Stopes’ virtual beatification by the
Royal Mail, an RM spokesman refused to say how the decision to include Stopes was made.
MSI, of course, also refused to comment on the controversy, employing the standard pro-
abortion tactic of just hoping that the controversy would blow over.

Reginald Ruggles Gates, Marie Stopes’ first husband, claimed that she was “supersexed to a
degree which was almost pathological.”[13] Judging by her activities, Stopes certainly
appears to have been a sex addict, and this preoccupation has undoubtedly been
transferred to Marie Stopes International, an organization that makes Planned Parenthood
look like a bunch of blushing virgins by comparison.

5/6
Endnotes
[1] Question: “What is Dr. Marie Stopes’ address? Does she have an organization for Birth
Control?” Answer: “Dr. Stopes is President of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and
Racial Progress, 108 Whitfield St., London W1, England” [“The Answer Box.” Birth Control
Review, Volume XIV, Number 11 (November 1930), page 332].

[2] “The Tenets of the C.B.C.,” 1923.

[3] Gerald Warner. “Marie Stopes is Forgiven Racism and Eugenics because She was Anti-
Life.” The Telegraph, August 28, 2008.

[4] Marie Carmichael Stopes. Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the
Future [London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons], 1920.

[5] Marie Carmichael Stopes. The Control of Parenthood, 1920.

[6] Marie Carmichael Stopes. Wise Parenthood: A Sequel to Married Love. London, 1918, page
7.

[7] Robert A. Peel of the Galton Institute [Editor]. Marie Stopes, Eugenics and the English Birth
Control Movement [Proceedings of a Conference organized by the Galton Institute,
Chameleon Press, London], 1996, page 55.

[8] Queens Hall Meeting on Constructive Birth Control: Speeches and Impressions, London, 1921.

[9] Dominic Lawson. “A Simple Lesson in Humanity.” The Independent, September 17, 2008.

[10] Patrick Goodenough. “Birth Control, Eugenics Advocate Honored with Postage Stamp.”
CNSNews.com, September 15, 2008. [Obviously, poor old Harry is a prisoner of ideology
and needs to catch up on current events. According to the United Nations Population
Information Network (POPIN), the world’s population is currently 7 billion, and will “top out”
at about 8.1 billion in the year 2045, after which it will begin to decline].

[11] Robert A. Peel of the Galton Institute [Editor]. Marie Stopes, Eugenics and the English
Birth Control Movement [Proceedings of a Conference organized by the Galton Institute,
Chameleon Press, London], 1996, page 81.

[12] The other five “Women of Distinction” in this series were suffragette Millicent Garrett
Fawcett, physician Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, civil rights activist Claudia Jones, lawmaker
Eleanor Rathbone and Labor Minister Barbara Castle.

[13] Robert A. Peel of the Galton Institute [Editor]. Marie Stopes, Eugenics and the English
Birth Control Movement [Proceedings of a Conference organized by the Galton Institute,
Chameleon Press, London], 1996, page 54.
6/6