Catholic Medical Quarterly Vol 76 (3) August 2026
Marie Stopes and Eugenics: a belated Victory?
Ann Farmer
Just
over a hundred years ago, Marie Stopes relocated her first birth control
centre, the Mothers’ Clinic, to central London, where it remains, although
its name - MSI Reproductive Choices - reflects much more recent attitudes:
motherhood, once seen as a noble calling, is now seen as inferior to
career-centred self-empowerment.
Of course, Stopes’s organisation aimed at preventing motherhood – specifically among the ‘unfit’ - but while the prevention of motherhood is now seen as perfectly acceptable, her guiding philosophy, eugenics, is not. Still it took many years for her Society For Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress to become problematical, but by 2020, her very name was tainted by eugenics, and Marie Stopes International, established in 1976 as a worldwide birth control provider, was duly renamed MSI Reproductive Choices.
In fact, eugenicists were fine with ‘reproductive choice’ – providing it was theirs. They believed they ought to decide who should, and who should not, reproduce, with ‘more from the fit, fewer from the unfit’. Ironically, Stopes had only one child, and Sir Francis Galton, founder of the Eugenics Education Society, none at all.
Sadly, they failed to acknowledge this as a sign of their own mental unfitness, rather they maintained that the wealthier classes restricted their family size not out of selfishness but prudence, while the poor demonstrated their mental deficiency by having more children than they could afford. But by their illogical logic, the very poverty of the poor ensured they would never be deemed fit enough to qualify – and of course compulsory sterilisation was their solution for those with real mental impairments.
However, the high birth rate of the impoverished classes was matched by a high infant mortality rate: not every child survived infancy or even birth. Mother Nature seemed to compensate for these losses with even more gifts of life, but Stopes saw these babies not as gifts but burdens, fearing that if all of them survived, poor families would be even larger.
She warned that the poor resorted to abortion and infanticide because they did not know how to avoid having children, although despite her warnings, privately referred women for abortions; but since she argued that contraception prevented abortion, she could hardly be seen to be promoting both.
And yet the ‘contraceptive mentality’ was more likely to lead to
abortion, as the idea of the ‘planned pregnancy’ led inevitably to the
‘unplanned pregnancy’ and what became its ready ‘solution’: abortion.
Now, the Western world enjoys material prosperity of which the poor of
Stopes’s era could only dream, although we are ‘child poor’;
abortion is the leading cause of death
globally,
but little concern has been shown about mass abortion, not least because
the appallingly high figures suggest that without it, the world would be
grossly ‘overpopulated’.
In reality, however, with young people expected to have uncommitted sexual relationships, abortion – often repeat abortion – is the most likely outcome.
With abortion pills so easily obtained, a great many babies are conceived, destined never to be born, while their massive numbers function as a warning against restrictions. Our high abortion rates promote population control; our dwindling birth rates show that abortion is population control.
It is no coincidence that since the 1960s we have witnessed a succession of ‘scare’ campaigns involving ‘overpopulation’. We were told that by the year 2000, there would be mass starvation, but when it became clear that we were not, after all, ‘running out of everything’, the doom-mongers warned about ‘global warming’; when this failed to materialise, the message changed again - to ‘climate change’. But with the economic pain of ‘green’ policies becoming apparent, we now hear reports of artificial intelligence making humans redundant.
Like its predecessors, however, the last of these warnings may be quietly forgotten: such fears attended the Industrial Revolution (the age of Malthus, godfather of population control) but in fact industrialisation created more prosperity for even more people. Put simply, people make prosperity; those who believe that too many (other) people pose an economic burden should remember the obvious fact: robots can make all sorts of things, but they can’t buy them.
Population control continues to be seen as ‘right wing’ by left-liberals, influenced by Adolf Hitler’s genocidal mania, while the historical record of Communist dictatorships controlling their populations – in addition to the starvation caused by their inept economic policies – is ignored. And yet their own demands for unlimited welfare have succeeded in making the poor expensive, while their twin demand for unlimited abortion offers a means of eliminating them before birth. In effect, they are doing the work of Malthus and Marie Stopes - not so much ‘right-wing’, as ‘right-on’ population control.
And it seems to be working: according to the Office for National Statistics, ‘[f]ewer children are being born in England and Wales’, and ‘the fertility rate is at its lowest level on record’. But rather than debating the number of children being born, dwindling birth rates may prompt discussion about quality, illustrating the point that population control invariably leads to eugenics.
Given the failure to tackle the current ‘birth dearth’ – indeed, all the action is in the opposite direction - it might seem that Marie Stopes has won after all.
And yet despite her insistence that a reduction in the number of poor children would improve humanity’s wellbeing, it seems that overall, mental health has never been worse, not helped by ‘end of the world’ doom-mongering. Meanwhile, abortion, overwhelmingly performed for ‘mental’ rather than medical problems, has succeeded in worsening psychological wellbeing.
However, given her belief that when the wrong people do most of the
breeding, there is an increase in mental deficiency, Stopes would
doubtless regard a rise in mental ill health as further vindicating
eugenics.
But with Christianity’s decline, our spiritual dimension has
been neglected; instead of being seen as ‘body and soul’, we are seen as
‘body and mind’, leading to the assumption that any problems not physical
must be mental.
And in a materialistic world that actively marginalises Christianity, a dearth of joy is hardly surprising, for as spiritual as well as material beings we need the consolation and hope that Christ brings.
The modern preoccupation with ‘self’, which functions as a therapeutic religion, encourages people to talk about their mental problems; but with so many ‘confessing’ to the ‘sin’ of poor mental health, instead of eugenicists singling out the ‘mentally unfit’, we single out ourselves: effectively, DIY eugenics.
And we have only to look at the disproportionately high rates of abortion for the poor and/or non-white to see that abortion is doing the work not only of population control but of eugenics.
This is despite the left-liberal progressive religion of ‘diversity, inclusivity and equity’, which apparently also allows disabled babies to be legally killed up to birth. But with Parliamentary moves to decriminalise mothers committing abortions at any stage, for any reason, we may see the truly ‘inclusive’ approach of allowing all babies to be despatched even while in the birth canal.
The eugenics focus on eliminating disability has been shifted to ‘a woman’s right to choose’, conveniently disguising abortion’s true target. Moreover, echoes of old controversies about encouraging the ‘lazy poor’ to have ‘too many children’ were heard in response to the recent decision not to limit welfare benefits to the first two children in a family.
Surely Marie Stopes has triumphed after all? With eugenics disguised as ‘women’s healthcare’, it might seem so; but paradoxically, Parliamentary attempts to introduce unlimited abortion may lead – eventually - to the end of pre-birth child sacrifice, by placing the humanity of the unborn child centre stage. The outcome of this pro-death Parliamentary initiative may well provide the definitive answer to the question of whether Marie Stopes enjoys a belated victory.
Ann Farmer studied for a master’s degree at the Centre for Jewish
Christian Relations in Cambridge, England.
Her numerous publications
include By Their Fruits, a ground-breaking study on the eugenics roots of
the abortion campaign.
She is married with three children and four
grandchildren