Marie Stopes charity ditches its namesake over her views on eugenics
THE world’s best known reproductive rights charity i s ditching its name because of its namesake’s beliefs in eugenics and racial purity.
Marie Stopes International, which provides family planning services to women in 37 countries worldwide, including the UK, has revealed that it will drop the feminist’s name and rebrand as MSI Reproductive Choices.
The decision comes as the organisation launches a 10-year strategy, but also amid increasing discomfort about its links to Dr Marie Stopes.
“Although undoubtedly a family planning pioneer and incredibly successful in her field… by today’s standards, a l ot of her utterances are completely unacceptable,” Simon Cook, chief executive of MSI Reproductive Choices, told The Daily Telegraph.
He added that the MSI board first agreed the name change in November 2019, but “events of 2020 triggered further conversations about looking forward rather than backwards”. This year has seen an upsurge of protests in support of Black Lives Matter.
As a result, it was increasingly “proving difficult for us to explain [that Dr Stopes] was not our founder and these views were not our views”, Mr Cooke said.
Born in 1880, Dr Stopes was the first female academic at Manchester University, having gained a PHD in botany and geology in Munich.
She later gained acclaim after publishing the first sex manual aimed at women, Married Love, in 1918, which was shortly followed by a bestselling guide to birth control, Wise Parenthood. Both were translated into 13 languages and banned in America.
In 1921, Dr Stopes set up the first birth-control clinic in London. It was on this site that Dr Tim Black, Jean Black and Phil Harvey founded a new organisation more than 50 years later, which they named Marie Stopes in recognition of her work to overhaul attitudes to sex within marriage and access to birth control services. In 1999, she was voted
Woman of the Millennium by Guardian readers and in 2008 she featured on a 50p stamp as part of a series celebrating women of achievement.
But Dr Stopes, who died in 1958, was also a vocal supporter of eugenics, a set of now discredited pseudoscientific theories that promoted sterilisation of diseased or weak people to “perfect” the race.
She openly advocated the forced sterilisation of those she believed were “unfit for parenthood”, including the “diseased and degenerate” and “halfcastes”.
Similar concepts were promoted by the Nazis and Dr Stopes is said to have been a supporter of Adolf Hitler, reportedly sending him a book of her poems just before the Second World War broke out. In 1935, two years after Hitler rose to power, she attended a conference in Berlin on “population science”.
“She was a woman of her time… and represented attitudes fairly prevalent in her age,” said Mr Cooke. “But they don’t sit well with our values, which are focused on leaving no one behind.”