The Royal Mail has come in for major criticism by including
Marie Stopes in a set of stamps marking women's achievements.
Marie Stopes was a controversial figure who has been shown
as racist and anti-Semitic and who also advocated eugenics. Stopes campaigned
to have the poor, the sick and people of mixed race
sterilized, prompting the
question, is Marie Stopes really an appropriate icon for Britain's stamps?
Anthony Ozimic of the Society for the Protection of Unborn
Children in a statement said:
'Praising Marie Stopes as a woman of distinction should be as unacceptable as praising Adolf Hitler as a great leader. Both promoted compulsory sterilisation and thereby the eventual elimination of society's most vulnerable members to achieve what they called racial progress.'
Stopes also sent a loving letter and book of her poems to Adolf
Hitler.
The following article appears in today’s Telegraph under the
banner 'Marie Stopes is forgiven racism and eugenics because she was anti-life'.
The article can also be found on this link
Dear Herr Hitler, Love is the greatest thing in the world: so will you accept from me these (poems) that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?" These gushing words from an ardent fan (she was lucky Unity Mitford did not scratch her eyes out) were written in August 1939, just a month before this country went to war with Nazi Germany, by Marie Stopes, the "woman of distinction" who will ornament our 50p stamps from October.Is Marie Stopes really an appropriate icon for Britain's stamps?Sending the Fuhrer a book of her sentimental poems was an appropriate gesture. This keen advocate of eugenics and subverter of family life had a long career of activity in the politics of human reproduction. In 1919 she urged the National Birth Rate Commission to support mandatory sterilisation of parents who were diseased, prone to drunkenness or of bad character. In 1920, in her book Radiant Motherhood, she demanded "the sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory". Her 1921 slogan was: "Joyful and Deliberate Motherhood, A Safe Light in our Racial Darkness."As a letter writer to yesterday's paper pointed out, her organisation was called the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress and her clinics were situated in poor areas, to reduce the birth rate of the local residents. Not that Stopes wanted the working class to stop having children altogether. On the contrary, she was also a supporter of child labour: "Not many years ago the labourer's child could be set to work early and could very shortly earn his keep… The trend of legislation has continuously extended the age of irresponsible youth in the lower and lower middle classes"…In 1926 Stopes stipulated that the boy she would adopt as a companion for her son would be "completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised". In 1935 she was present at the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin, held under the auspices of the Third Reich. On her death she bequeathed her clinic and much of her fortune to the Eugenics Society. Today, Marie Stopes International has nearly 500 centres in 38 countries, performing more than half a million sterilisations a year, and is a major abortion provider.Considering the hysteria nowadays attaching to issues of race, at first sight it seems extraordinary that Stopes should have earned commemoration on a stamp. To the PC establishment, however, even racist peccadilloes can be ignored to honour a pioneer who helped promote the anti-life culture and relieve women of the intolerable trauma of giving birth to a child with a cleft palate. Eugenic abortion accounts for an increasing proportion of the 7 million "terminations" in Britain since 1967. Poor old Josef Mengele was not eligible for a stamp, being a dead, white male. Perhaps in 2009…
