Scots family planning pioneer is ditched by charity over eugenics
A LEADING abortion provider has changed its name to distance itself from Marie Stopes, deeming her views on eugenics in “stark contrast” to the charity’s values.
Marie Stopes International will be known as MSI Reproductive Choices from today, breaking its connection to the woman who paved the way for family planning.
The charity said the name change sends “a clear signal that we neither adhere to nor condone” her beliefs around eugenics.
Stopes set up Britain’s first birth control clinic in 1921 in Holloway, north London, in the face of medical and religious opposition, giving women advice and contraception.
In 1976, on hearing that the clinic was in financial difficulty and due to close, Dr Tim Black purchased the lease to the building, founding the modern organisation.
It became the first of more than 600 Marie Stopes International clinics around the world.
MSI Reproductive Choices said her legacy has become “deeply entangled” with her views on eugenics and wanted to address the “understandable misapprehensions that MSI had a meaningful connection to her and her views”.
Stopes was a member of the Eugenics Society, and she also advocated for the sterilisation of people considered unfit for parenthood.
MSI Reproductive Choices said these views, “though not uncommon at that time, are now rightly discredited”, and directly oppose the charity’s values of choice and autonomy.”
Simon Cooke, MSI Reproductive Choices chief executive, said: “Marie Stopes was a pioneer for family planning; however, she was also a supporter of the eugenics movement and expressed many opinions, which are in stark contrast to MSI’S core values and principles.
“The name of the organisation has been a topic of discussion for many years and the events of 2020 have reaffirmed that changing our name is the right decision.”
Stopes was born in Edinburgh in 1880, she later gained a science degree at University College London and had a successful career in palaeobotany – the study of fossil plants.
But her personal experience motivated her to promote sex education and the use of contraception – having experienced a failed marriage which led to her writing Britain’s first sex manual, Married Love.
Stopes was also among the founders of the National Birth Control Council, which later became known as the Family Planning Association.
Despite services in her name offering abortion care after her death, she had actually been opposed to abortion during her lifetime.
She is described as a writer and family planning pioneer by English Heritage, which erected a blue plaque in 2010 at her first London home at 28 Cintra Park in Upper Norwood in south-east London.
But her forward-thinking work in this area is now marred by her views on eugenics – the widely discredited study of the selective breeding of humans to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as “desirable”.
English Heritage said many of Stopes’ views, which included encouraging those she deemed most suitable for parenthood to reproduce, while discouraging others, “now seem repugnant”.
She was also opposed to mixed marriages, fell out with her only son because he had married someone who was short-sighted, and once wrote to a deaf father of four deaf children that he had brought “more misery... into the world”, English Heritage said.
Stopes died in 1958, aged 77. Mr Cooke added: “Our founders believed that by providing high quality, compassionate and comprehensive contraceptive and abortion care, they could support women’s empowerment, and their vision of reproductive choice for all is just as relevant today as it was in 1976.
“This decade has opened with many uncertainties, but what we can be sure of is that the need for sexual and reproductive healthcare and rights will remain universal and urgent.”