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MARIE STOPES D.Sc., Ph.D. (friend of Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger).

Born 15 October 1880 (1880-10-15)
Died 2 October 1958 (1958-10-03) (aged 77)

Marie Carmichael Stopes (15 October 1880 – 2 October 1958) was a Scottish author, palaeobotanist, campaigner for women’s rights and pioneer in the field of birth control.

Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News which gave anatomically explicit advice, and in addition to her enthusiasm for protests at places of worship this provoked protest from both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. Her sex manual Married Love, which was written, she claimed, while she was still a virgin, was controversial and influential.

The modern organisation that bears her name, Marie Stopes International, works in 42 countries[1]. In 2008 there were 560 centres, including 5 in Bolivia, 9 in the UK, 10 in Australia, 25 in Kenya, 24 in South Africa, 48 in Pakistan and over 100 in Bangladesh.

Stopes opened the UK’s first family planning clinic, the Mothers’ Clinic at 61, Marlborough Road, Holloway, North London on 17 March 1921.

In 1925 the Mothers’ Clinic moved to Central London, where it remains to this day.

Stopes and her fellow family planning pioneers around the globe, like DORA RUSSELL, played a major role in breaking down taboos about sex and increasing knowledge, pleasure and improved reproductive health. In 1930 the National Birth Control Council was formed.

Advocacy of eugenics - Stopes was a prominent campaigner for the implementation of policies inspired by EUGENICS, then not a discredited science. In her Radiant Motherhood (1920) she called for the “sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood [to] be made an immediate possibility, indeed MADE COMPULSORY.”

She contributed a chapter manifesto to The Control of Parenthood (1920), comprising a sort of manifesto for her circle of Eugenicists, arguing for a “UTOPIA” TO BE ACHIEVED THROUGH “RACIAL PURIFICATION”:

Those who are grown up in the present active generations, the matured and hardened, with all their weaknesses and flaws, cannot do very much, though they may do something with themselves. They can, however, study the conditions under which they came into being, discover where lie the chief sources of defect, and eliminate those sources of defect from the coming generation so as to remove from those who are still to be born the needless burdens the race has carried.[2]

However, in this tract, she argues that the leading causes of “racial degeneration” are “overcrowding” and sexually transmitted disease (ibid, p. 211). It concludes somewhat vaguely, that racial consciousness needs to be increased so that, “women of all classes [may] have the fear and dread of undesired maternity removed from them ...” to usher in the promised utopia, described throughout. (ibid, p. 221)

In 1935 Stopes attended the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin, held under the NAZI REGIME.[3] She was more than once accused of being anti-Semitic by other pioneers of the birth control movement such as Havelock Ellis.[4]

As came to public attention years later, she was a PERSONAL AS WELL AS POLITICAL DEVOTEE OF ADOLF HITLER:

“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 [...][5]

After her son Harry married a myopic woman, Stopes cut him out of her will. The daughter-in-law—Mary Eyre Wallis, later Mary Stopes-Roe—was the daughter of the noted engineer Barnes Wallis. Stopes reasoned that prospective grandchildren might inherit the condition.[6]

Following the death of Marie Stopes in 1958, a large part of her personal fortune went to the Eugenics Society.[7]

Prior to her claim that her marriage to Canadian geneticist Reginald Ruggles Gates in 1911 was unconsummated, she had a serious relationship with Japanese botanist Kenjiro Fujii or Fugii, whom she met at the University of Munich in 1904 whilst researching her Ph.D. It was so serious, that in 1907, during her 1904-1910 tenure at Manchester University, she went to be with him in Japan, but the affair ended. Her marriage to Gates was annulled in 1914.

In 1918 she married the financial backer of her most famous work, Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of the Sex Difficulties, Humphrey Verdon Roe, brother of Alliott Verdon Roe. Their son, the philosopher Harry Stopes-Roe, was born in 1924.[8]

Stopes died at her home in Dorking, Surrey, UK from breast cancer.

the 1920s onward, Marie Stopes gradually built up a small network of clinics that were initially very successful, but by the early 1970s were in financial difficulties. In 1975 the clinics went into voluntary receivership. The modern organisation that bears Marie Stopes’ name was established a year later as an international Non-Governmental Organisation working on Sexual and Reproductive Health. The Marie Stopes International (MSI) global partnership took over responsibility for the main clinic, and in 1978 it began its work overseas in New Delhi. Since then the organisation has grown steadily and today the MSI works in 38 countries, has 452 clinics worldwide and has offices in London, Brussels, Melbourne and USA.

In 2006 alone, the organisation provided services to 4.6 million clients and by 2010 aims to protect 20 million couples from unplanned pregnancies and unsafe abortion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Stopes