Marie Stopes Dyslogy
The following is lifted from David Lindsay’s blog:
[....] Or Marie Stopes, author of extravagant, versified love letters to Hitler? Marie Stopes, who disowned her own son because he married a woman who wore glasses. Marie Stopes, who campaigned for the compulsory sterilisation of “the C3 population”, of “half-castes” and of “revolutionaries”, among numerous others. Marie Stopes, who opened dozens of clinics in working class areas to reduce the number of “undesirables” by persuasion if force were politically impossible.
Yet those clinics now retain the right to “counsel” women considering the abortions that they have a gigantic financial interest in ensuring go ahead. They still carry the name of Marie Stopes. Our televisions now carry their adverts. Our 50p stamps have recently carried her image. And we all carry the shame.
September 8th, 2011 at 5:34 pm
I was reading this very thing about half an hour ago, lol, but on the Anglican Mainstream site. How anyone can idolise her is beyond me.
September 8th, 2011 at 5:41 pm
Yeah I saw it appear over on AM just before I posted it.
I’m glad though; I think this deserves a wider audience.
September 8th, 2011 at 7:17 pm
Yes, it is difficult to rave over the woman. But then there are many figures from history that we rave over! Luther has left us some very awkward comments on Jews (http://www.awitness.org/books/luther/on_jews_and_their_lies_p2.html) as have more than a few Catholic thinkers. St Cyril of Alexandria was probable one of the most obnoxious men ever to draw breath. It is easy to pick and choose a piece here and piece there for someone’s life and work and present it as either saintly or evil. I think it should be remembered that the world Stopes saw, the grinding poverty, social inequality, the suffering of women who bore the brunt of large families and the vagaries of a capitalist economy occurred at a time when the churches were full and Britain claimed it was a Christian nation. Perhaps if this had translated into a bit more tangible social action the likes of Stopes (or the liberal secular state for that matter) would have never risen to prominence!
That said I don’t warm to the organisation – it is interesting to look at this charity’s accounts: 97% of its income comes from ‘charitable activities’ in other words the money governments (it’s an international organisation) or charges it makes to users or other organisations. So there is a good deal of political will to maintain this organisation.
Mind you ‘Pro-Life’ charities doesn’t always hit the mark either! http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/02/abortion-pregnancy-counselling-found-wanting
P.
September 8th, 2011 at 7:30 pm
In hoc signo vinces†
“… who opened dozens of clinics in working class areas to reduce the number of “undesirables” by persuasion if force were politically impossible.
Always wondered when the sordid prenatal genocide of the indigenous working class, sub-working class and underclass in the U.K. would be addressed in the political arena.
When the working class died, fought and paid for the NHS they never could have envisaged that it would have been used as an extermination machine against their own by the political elites of Conservative and Labour governments.
September 9th, 2011 at 2:33 pm
It is unremarkable that heroes of previous generations also held beliefs we now consider abhorrent. Eugenics was popular with the great and the good at the start of the 20th Century. If we treat everyone who approved of eugenics as a pariah we lose a lot of famous name.
Dr Marie Stopes is by no means alone. Winston Churchill held similar views, as did Alexander Graham Bell, President Theodore Roosevelt and many others.
We honour her memory not because of her nasty eugenic ideas, but for of her pioneering work in contraception and women’s reproductive health. I don’t think anyone “idolises” Dr Marie Stopes. The clinic is named after her because she founded it in 1921. It moved, under her direction, to its current headquarters in 1925.
Neither Sir Winston Churchill or Dr Maries Stopes led altogether admirable lives – but her legacy is – like his – the good that she did.
September 9th, 2011 at 8:53 pm
Isobel, Bath:
In the 1930s, there were two British threats to constitutionality and, via Britain’s role in the world, to international stability. One came from an unreliable, opportunistic, highly affected and contrived, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, Eurofederalist demagogue who admired Mussolini, heaped praise on Hitler, had no need to work for a living, had an overwhelming sense of his own entitlement, profoundly hated democracy, and had a callous disregard for the lives of the lower orders and the lesser breeds. So did the other one. Far more than background united Churchill and Mosley, originator in English of the currently modish concept of a Union of the Mediterranean.
In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that: “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed, functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”.
All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, which as much as anything else has been an inspiration to the vociferous anti-monarchist minority in Australia ever since: “Why should we bother with them after that?” The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, while he borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. In reality, the Soviet Union that had been broken by the War had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, still less to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.
But the electorate was under no illusions while he was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two of them – the first, I say again, while the War was still going on – and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It went on to win comfortably the subsequent General Election, just as it was to do in 1992 after it had removed Thatcher.
And we have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought, making it a failure in its own terms. We condemn genocidal terrorism against Slavs and Balts no less than genocidal terrorism against Arabs, or the blowing up of British Jews going about their business as civil servants, or the photographed hanging of teenage British conscripts with barbed wire. Churchill’s Zionism was precisely that of the BNP, seeing the Jews as not really British, and therefore wishing to transport them to Palestine. On this, if on nothing else, Nick Griffin is right: if Churchill were alive today, then he would be in the BNP. It would be welcome to him.
September 9th, 2011 at 9:47 pm
Thank you David, your articulate and informative comment was much appreciated.
September 9th, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Do you really think he’d be in the BNP? I don’t. Churchill was, above all else, an opportunist. Well, maybe not above being a war-mongering imperialist toff, but above everything else. He took the view that one needed a charger to take one into battle, and one should take the best hack in the stable.
Had he been a politician in recent years, I reckon he’d have been in Blair’s Labour, and would have crossed the floor to the Tory benches when Brown was in charge, sensing which way the wind would blow…
(Other than that, I think I agree with your whole analysis.)