Written by Kathy Clubb
13th September 2024
Two of the largest abortion businesses in the world, Marie Stopes International and Planned Parenthood, were founded by women who were contemporaries and who had a great deal in common. Strangely neither woman was a staunch supporter of abortion. Although living on different continents, Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger were both obsessed by liberal sexual ethics, contraception and eugenics. They began as colleagues but eventually became bitter rivals, largely due their disordered personalities.
Marie Stopes was born in England and lived from 1880 to 1958. She was a paleobotanist and a feminist who went on to found Britain’s first birth control clinic. Stopes wrote several books which were very influential in promoting the idea that sexual relations could be divested from procreation, and she can take some credit for convincing the Anglican hierarchy to approve contraception in 1930. She opened her first birth control clinic in 1921.
Margaret Sanger was born in the United States a year earlier than Stopes and died in 1966. She came from a large family and was determined from an early age to relieve women of the ‘burden’ of childbearing. Sanger was a nurse and became a pioneering ‘sex expert’, disseminating her ideas through books and newspaper columns. She campaigned for the legalisation of contraception in the US and in 1916 opened America’s first birth control clinic.
Both Sanger and Stopes were highly immoral women: both agitated for ‘egalitarian’ sexuality and had numerous affairs, including with lesbians. Sanger was greatly influenced by the works of ‘sexologist’ Havelock Ellis, whom she had met while living in England. Ellis was akin to a 19th century Alfred Kinsey, promoting the idea that children are sexual beings and that perversions such as homosexuality are normal. Sanger and Ellis began an illicit affair even though Sanger was married to another man with whom she had three children.
Marie Stopes also promoted a perverted view of sexuality, encouraged by the homosexual author, Edward Carpenter. She took the ideas presented in his fictional books and applied them to heterosexual marriages, stressing that sexual relations could be uncoupled from procreation by the use of contraception. Stopes promoted the idea that pleasure was an end in itself, suggesting that this aspect was necessarily absent in fertile marriages; she went even further to ‘spiritualise’ the marital act in language reminiscent of occult religionists. The mentors of both women, Carpenter and Ellis, also described sex in esoteric terms, praising its mystical ‘transcendence.’
CONTRACEPTION
Prior to opening her clinic, Sanger distributed a monthly newsletter about contraception, and also supplied contraceptive barrier devices through the mail. This led to many fines and court appearances as she was acting in violation of obscenity laws which operated at that time in the US. In her 1931 book, My Fight for Birth Control, Sanger describes how she coined the phrase ‘birth control.’ Stopes is said not to have liked the term, but went on to adopt it as it appealed to her clientele.
The founding principles of Sanger’s work were that children should be conceived ‘in love’, conceived deliberately, and conceived only by healthy mothers. She believed that contraception should be available in all other circumstances. Her clinic was initially funded by JD Rockefeller Jr., a name familiar to anyone who understands the link between globalist financiers and population control.
Sanger spread her ideas on contraception to China, Japan and Korea and was also involved in early attempts to produce a contraceptive pill. She lent her support to the pill’s inventors, Gregory Pinkus and John Rock, at a time when the medical establishment was unwilling to research fertility control, and she secured funding for their research.
In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and from 1952 to 1959, Sanger served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
At the same time as Margaret Sanger was founding the National Birth Control League in the United States, Stopes was pushing her agenda in Britain and her colonies: even Australia was not immune from the propaganda campaign. One of her speaking events was recorded in the Adelaide Advertiser, which stated that, “The key to racial progress, declares Dr. Marie Stopes, is constructive birth control, which should be one of the planks of the League of Nations platform.”[1]
While conservative media outlets continued to refuse to promote Stopes’ events, fellow promoters of contraception from abroad hailed her. She was invited to travel to the US to address the American Voluntary Parenthood League, founded by Mary Dennett.
ABORTION
Despite the modern iterations of both Stopes’ and Sangers’ businesses relying on abortion as their core service, neither woman was personally in favour of abortion. Sanger’s legacy organisation, Planned Parenthood, claims that she promoted contraception as a means of avoiding abortions[2]. Of course, experience shows that more contraception leads to more abortion due to the anti-child sentiments behind both. Indeed, in Sanger’s work, the genesis of the now-famous pro-abortion slogan, ‘my body, my choice’ can be detected: “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether or not she will be a mother.” (Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race).
Stopes’ attitude towards abortion was quite nuanced. Employees at her birth control clinic were expected to sign a declaration stating that they would not be involved in criminal abortion, which can be attributed to the negative public perception of contraception at the time. Abortion and contraception were linked in the public mind and since abortion was a criminal offence, Stopes went to great pains to publicly distance herself from it.
The connection between contraception and abortion was so strong that many women who approached one of Marie Stopes’ birth control clinics were already pregnant. Clinic records show that many women believed that terminating an early pregnancy was not an abortion and such women were always turned away. Stopes herself acknowledged that all denominations prohibited “the taking of even an embryonic life,” and that she believed abortion was harmful for women and society.[3]
However, according to some of her existing letters, Stopes appears to have privately endorsed the use of abortion. In one case, she suggested the use of hot baths and herbs, making it clear that instruments should not be used. Another letter shows her referring the recipient to a doctor for “evacuation of the uterus.”
EUGENICS
By far the most controversial aspect in the careers of both Stopes and Sanger is their adherence to the ideology of eugenics. While this may be attributed to the fashion among libertarians of the 19th century, both women furthered the eugenic cause exponentially through their promotion of contraception. By packaging birth control as a benefit to women, their poor and working class clients became unwitting participants in the elites’ eugenic campaign.
Eugenics in general and Stopes in particular, had a disastrous influence on the Anglican Church. One of the most influential bishops behind the shocking reversal of their position on contraception, Theodore Woods, was concerned that birth rates among the middle and upper classes in Britain were falling catastrophically.
Rather than maintaining the ban on contraception, Woods believed that by becoming more ‘modern’ the Church of England would resume its moral authority, leading the upper classes to take its call for larger families more seriously. Woods and many other bishops were infected by the eugenics mindset which suggested that the ‘inferior’ classes were breeding too vigorously, and so an opening to contraception would have the double-effect of limiting the number of children among these classes. It was a completely wrong-headed strategy that went on to fail by every metric.
It was largely due to pressure from Woods that the Anglican hierarchy dropped its prohibition on contraception at the 1930 Lambeth Conference only ten years after the prohibition was emphatically restated at the 1920 Conference. After 1920, the Anglican clergy began to heed the suggestions of Marie Stopes, who believed she had a mission from God to change their minds on contraception. By the time 1930 dawned, Woods had little trouble in convincing his confreres that Stopes was correct.
Stopes made no secret of her hope for a racially pure society, going so far in 1922 as to request that parliamentarians sign a pledge to stop inferior (C3) classes from procreating.Her mania did not stop there: Stopes vocally objected to deaf people bearing children and even disowned her daughter-in-law because she wore glasses.
Sanger also made no secret of her hatred of the lower classes. In 1921, she wrote a paper entitled, “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda”, in which she said that “The eugenic and civilizational value of Birth Control is becoming apparent to the enlightened and the intelligent.” Sanger wrote that high numbers of children coming from ‘unfit’ parents was “the greatest present menace to civilization.” She explained that by ‘unfit’, she meant the ‘feeble-minded’, the ‘mentally defective’ and the ‘poverty stricken.’ She blamed ‘stupidly cruel sentimentalism’ for what she saw as the scourge of ‘chaotic breeding’ and wrote that education in birth control methods would forestall more drastic intervention by governments to curb the number of ‘unfit’ children.[4]
MEETING
By the time the two women came to meet in person, the stage was set for a brief, and ultimately dysfunctional alliance. The meeting took place some time between 1913 and 1915, when Sanger was on one of her trips to England. According to Sanger’s account of the meeting, it was Stopes who asked her advice about methods of contraception – something Sanger said that Marie Stopes knew nothing about at that time. Sanger later wrote:
“She was extremely interested in the correlation of marital success to birth-control knowledge, although she admitted she knew nothing about the latter. Could I tell her exactly what methods were used and how? In spite of my belief that the Netherlands clinics could be improved upon, I was fired with fervour for the idea as such, and described them as I had seen them.”[5]
Despite their apparently cordial meeting, this was to mark the beginning of the end of their cooperation. For Stopes and Sanger were to become bitter enemies: driven by their temperaments more than by any other factor.
Curiously, much of the information about their falling out comes from an unlikely source: the feminist activist Germain Greer. In her 1984 book, Sex and Destiny, Greer unleashes on both women, referring to them as “tireless self-promoters, unintelligent and insensitive observers of human nature”. Greer notes that “each was constitutionally incapable of respecting the opinions of the people she ostensibly desired to help.”[6]
According to Greer, Stopes and Sanger were unaware that many women of their time already had easy access to contraception. She points out that a rubber diaphragm had been available to British women since at least 1886, and it was freely advertised in newspapers. The difference was that most women viewed contraception as a private affair, with the knowledge being passed on from mother to daughter. According to Greer, it was their preoccupation with racial hygiene (eugenics) which led both Sanger and Stopes to make contraception into a public cause for which they each became figureheads in their respective countries. Greer wrote,
“Women who had managed their affairs with less clamour may well have been revolted by the specious arguments and vulgar publicity-hunting of the zealots. Certainly they did not come forward to explain their own practices. Stopes and Sanger were permitted by this reticence to continue believing themselves the inventors of married love.”[7]
1920 marks the point of end of the short lived alliance Sanger and Stopes. That year, a meeting was held in Cambridge at which both women were present, where the discussion centred around the need for a maternal and child health clinic (which would provide contraceptives) to be set up in a large country town in the UK. However, the two women refused to work on the project together: several years of simmering tensions had begun to boil over. Stopes, for example, had not been publicly thanked by Sanger for the assistance she gave her in instigating a petition to President Woodrow Wilson. Sanger also had Stopes’ book republished in the US under a different name and containing unapproved changes. Additionally, each woman was unyielding on her preferred method of contraception, which further fractured the fledgling birth control movement.
Stopes’ precocious personality created problems for her own business as well. Her lack of insight led to many failings in the running of her clinic and even compromised the effectiveness of her products. Further, she demanded to be known as the founder of the first birth control clinic in the world, even though the first one had opened almost forty years before hers in Amsterdam.
Things went from bad to worse once Stopes decided to prosecute Dr. Halliday Sutherland for libel in 1923. Dr. Sutherland had been vocal about her eugenic agenda and the court case garnered a great deal of negative publicity for Stopes and for the entire birth control movement. During the trial, Stopes made public her disdain for other people’s birth control methods, promoting her own without sufficient scientific evidence. Stopes even rashly condemned similar devices made by other manufacturers as being carcinogenic.
As Chesterton said, birth control is about neither birth nor control[8]: the legacies of both Sanger and Stopes confirm this pithy observation. For their love affair with contraception gave birth, not to an innocent child but to a hideous deformity we now know as abortion-on-demand. Their lack of self control infected Western culture with the disease of individualism to the point where it is difficult for even the highly educated to give the correct definition of a woman.
The final years of both women tell their story. Stopes’ peers lost all respect for her after she persisted in publishing reports on her successes which were not backed up by any scientific evidence. Modern accounts of the success of her clinics are far less rosy than those from Stopes herself: Greer states that the Stopes clinic “produced more than its fair share of expensive abortions and unwanted babies.”[9]
Sanger’s last public appearance was in 1961 at a conference of the eugenic Population Council. According to Germain Greer, Sanger could not stay awake due to her dependence on the opioid Demerol.[10]
