Marie Stopes, Francis Galton, Emma Goldman (Sangers mentor), Margaret Sanger, Sidney and Beatrice Webb were all enthusiastic advocates for compulsory sterilization of whom they regarded as unfit.
A commentator (19th Feb 09 11.29)on the Guardian editorial (comment is free) draws attention to the Fabian Tract of 1906 written by the Webbs in which they say:
In Great Britain at this moment, when half, or perhaps two-thirds of all the married people are regulating their families, children are being freely born to the Irish Roman Catholics and the Polish, Russian and German Jews, the thriftless and irresponsible. This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration, or this country falling to the Irish and the Jews.
Fry and Hitchens go around calling the Holy Father a Nazi. I wonder what they think of Marie Stopes who sent letters and poems to Hitler? But then the ability for double-think is a necessary requirement if you want to be considered for the liberal elite.
Marie Stopes is forgiven racism and eugenics because she was anti-life
“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?”
These gushing words from an ardent fan (she was lucky Unity Mitford did not scratch her eyes out) were written in August 1939, just a month before this country went to war with Nazi Germany, by Marie Stopes, the “woman of distinction” who will ornament our 50p stamps from October.
Sending the Fuhrer a book of her sentimental poems was an appropriate gesture. This keen advocate of eugenics and subverter of family life had a long career of activity in the politics of human reproduction.
In 1919 she urged the National Birth Rate Commission to support mandatory sterilisation of parents who were diseased, prone to drunkenness or of bad character. In 1920, in her book Radiant Motherhood, she demanded “the sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory”.
Her 1921 slogan was: “Joyful and Deliberate Motherhood, A Safe Light in our Racial Darkness.”
As a letter writer to yesterday’s paper pointed out, her organisation was called the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress and her clinics were situated in poor areas, to reduce the birth rate of the local residents.
Not that Stopes wanted the working class to stop having children altogether. On the contrary, she was also a supporter of child labour: “Not many years ago the labourer’s child could be set to work early and could very shortly earn his keep… The trend of legislation has continuously extended the age of irresponsible youth in the lower and lower middle classes”…
In 1926 Stopes stipulated that the boy she would adopt as a companion for her son would be “completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised”.
In 1935 she was present at the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin, held under the auspices of the Third Reich. On her death she bequeathed her clinic and much of her fortune to the Eugenics Society.
Today, Marie Stopes International has nearly 500 centres in 38 countries, performing more than half a million sterilisations a year, and is a major abortion provider.
Considering the hysteria nowadays attaching to issues of race, at first sight it seems extraordinary that Stopes should have earned commemoration on a stamp. To the PC establishment, however, even racist peccadilloes can be ignored to honour a pioneer who helped promote the anti-life culture and relieve women of the intolerable trauma of giving birth to a child with a cleft palate.
Eugenic abortion accounts for an increasing proportion of the 7 million “terminations” in Britain since 1967. Poor old Josef Mengele was not eligible for a stamp, being a dead, white male. Perhaps in 2009…