APPLYING DARWINISM:

The opening of the Mothers' Clinic was the first step of an attempt to impose eugenic breeding in Britain. As the manifesto of the clinic's support organisation, The Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress ("CBC") put it:

"AS REGARDS THE POPULATION AT PRESENT. We say that there are unfortunately many men and women who should be prevented from procreating children at all, because of their individual ill-health, or the diseased and degenerate nature of the offspring that they may be expected to produce. These considerations would not apply to a better and healthier world."

While the in-house "Prorace" (and later "Racial") brand devices were dispensed to the poor women who attended the Mothers' Clinic, Stopes campaigned for laws to compulsorily sterilise those who did not. For all the talk of giving women "choice", had the laws for compulsory sterilisation that Stopes advocated been passed, that choice would have been made by the state.

In the absence of such laws, Stopes advocated the use of the Gold Pin, an experimental and dangerous device which was, she wrote:

"... the one and only method (apart from actual sterilisation) which is applicable, and of real help to the lowest and most negligent strata of society. It is therefore a method of the greatest possible racial and social value, and should become widely known and practised."

During the trial, physicians on both sides differed as to the impact that the Gold Pin would have. Some said it would enhance conception, others that it would prevent conception, and yet others that it was an abortifacient. A leading birth controller, Dr Norman Haire, testified that if conception did take place, the presence of the Gold Pin would lead to a dangerous septic abortion. Another doctor described it as "a barbarous instrument".

The CBC was supported by some of the most eminent Britons of that era. They included: John Maynard Keynes, the Lady Constance Lytton, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. One of them, Sir James Barr, an eminent physician and ex-president of the British Medical Association, congratulated Stopes on her achievement:

"You and your husband have inaugurated a great movement which I hope will eventually get rid of our C3 [defective] population and exterminate poverty. The only way to raise an A1 [superior] population is to breed them."

Like other eugenicists, Stopes and Roe had worried about the "differential birth rate". While Britain's overall birth rate had been falling since 1876, the reduction was not evenly spread across all social classes and the poorest people in Britain were the most prolific. As one historian put it:

"... [one-] half of each succeeding generation was produced by no more than a quarter of its married predecessor, and that the prolific quarter was disproportionately located among the dregs of society."

Eugenicists spoke of "degeneration", "national deterioration" and even "race suicide".

Dr Stopes had alerted the readers of the Daily Mail to the problem in a column a few years earlier:

"Are these puny-faced, gaunt, blotchy, ill-balanced, feeble, ungainly, withered children the young of an imperial race? Why has Mrs Jones had nine children six died, one defective? Nor it is for Mrs Jones to take the initiative, Isn't it for the leisured, the wise, to go to her and tell her what are the facts of life, the meaning of what she is doing, and what she ought to do? ... Mrs Jones is destroying the race!"

Testifying on the second day of the High Court trial in 1923, Stopes confirmed that she had opened the clinic:

"... to counteract the steady evil which has been growing for a good many years of the reduction of the birth rate just on the part of the thrifty, wise, well-contented, and the generally sound members of our community, and the reckless breeding from the C3 end, and the semi-feebleminded, the careless, who are proportionately increasing in our community because of the slowing of the birth rate at the other end of the social scale. Statistics show that every year the birth rate from the worst end of our community is increasing in proportion to the birth rate at the better end, and it was in order to try to right that grave social danger that I embarked upon this work."

Stopes was a doctor of science, but her scientific credentials were in sharp contrast to the vituperative (and unscientific) language she used to describe those to be sterilised and their offspring: "hopelessly bad cases, bad through inherent disease, or drunkenness or character" "wastrels, the diseased... the miserable [and] the criminal" the "degenerate, feeble minded and unbalanced", "parasites", "hordes of defectives" and "the spawn of drunkards". Such language led Guardian columnist Zoe Williams -- a journalist not known to be unsympathetic to contraception and feminism -- to remark that "her eugenics programme was actually slightly to the right of Hitler's just because her definition of defective is so broad."

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