ON THIS DAY

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March 17, 1921:

Marie Stopes opened first birth control clinic in England.

Marie Stopes (1880 – 1958) was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights.

With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain on March 17, 1921. Margaret Sanger, another birth-control pioneer, had opened a birth control clinic in New York but the police closed it. Stopes’ clinic was run by midwives and supported by visiting doctors. It offered mothers birth control advice, taught them birth control methods and dispensed Stopes own "Pro-Race" and "Racial" cervical caps. The free clinic was open to all married women for knowledge about reproductive health. Stopes tried to discover alternatives for families and increase knowledge about birth control and the reproductive system.

Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. Stopes publicly opposed abortion, arguing that the prevention of conception was all that was needed.

A playground rhyme at the time was:

Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes,

Read a book by Marie Stopes,

But, to judge from her condition,

She must have read the wrong edition

Stope’s actions in private were at odds with her public pronouncements. A firm believer in eugenics, inhibiting the fertility of people and groups considered inferior or promoting that of those considered superior, she advocated:

• the compulsory sterilisation of those she considered unfit for parenthood - 

“degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who are now in our midst and who devastate social customs. These populate most rapidly and tend proportionately to increase and these are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping its vitality."

• opposition to mixed race marriages - In 1934, an interview published in the Australian Women's Weekly disclosed her views on mixed-race marriages: she advised correspondents against them and believed that all half-castes should be sterilised at birth... 

    "thus painlessly and in no way interfering with the individual's life,         the unhappy fate of he who is neither black nor white is prevented         from being passed on to yet unborn babes."

• publicly, Stopes professed to oppose abortion; during her lifetime, her clinics did not offer that service. She single-mindedly pursued abortion providers and used the police and the courts to prosecute them. In a 1919 letter however she had outlined a method of abortion to an unidentified correspondent, and according to a biographer, she "was even prepared in some cases to advocate abortion, or, as she preferred to put it, the evacuation of the uterus".

In reaction to her controversial beliefs, Marie Stopes International in 2020 changed its name to "MSI Reproductive Choices" with no other changes.

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