Marie Stopes opened Britain’s first birth control clinic in north London in 1921
Marie Stopes may have been a pioneer for family planning, but her support for the eugenics movement also makes her a controversial historical figure.
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.
She opened Britain’s first birth control clinic in north London in 1921 and the Marie Stopes Mothers’ Clinic later moved to Whitfield Street, in central London, giving women advice and contraception.
Miss 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 the south-east of the capital.
Marie Stopes gained a science degree at University College London and had a successful career in palaeobotany – the study of fossil plants
On it she is listed as a promoter of sex education and birth control.
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 Miss Stopes’s 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 chosen to marry 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.
As Marie Stopes UK announced a name change to MSI Reproductive Choices, its chief executive Simon Cooke 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. As we look to the future, we are reflecting our fundamental focus in our new name, MSI Reproductive Choices.’
Marie Stopes was also among the founders of the National Birth Control Council which later became known as the Family Planning Association
The organisation said her ‘rightly discredited’ eugenics beliefs ‘stand in direct opposition to our core principles of choice and autonomy’, and that the name change sends ‘a clear signal that we neither adhere to nor condone her beliefs’.
Miss Stopes died in 1958, aged 77. The acknowledgment around that time by the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops of the necessity of birth control was a vindication of her work, but the idea of using birth control for improvement of the gene pool was ‘utterly discredited’, English Heritage said.
MSI was founded in 1976 by Dr Tim Black, Jean Black and Phil Harvey, with their first clinic opening on the site of the original Marie Stopes’ Mothers Clinic in central London.
The organisation was originally named in recognition of the origins of the building and Miss Stopes’s pioneering work in family planning.
Today, MSI provides contraception and abortion services to women and girls in 37 countries around the world.
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