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CATHOLIC TEACHING ON THE FAMILY

Eugenics and the true history of the Abortion Campaign (3)

By Ann Farmer   |   19 March 2025

This is the third of a twelve-part series beginning with Eugenics and the true history of the Abortion Campaign (1).

As seen, some abortion campaigners had links with Nazism, despite their policy of compulsory sterilisation — indeed, that was the main attraction, although English eugenicists were wary of controversies about anti-Semitism. They continued to claim that sterilisation would be purely voluntary, although the truly “mentally unfit” could not consent; significantly, eugenicists were attracted to home-grown Fascism because of its compulsory sterilisation policy, while acknowledging that such links would be controversial, especially with the Left. Despite this, C P Blacker visited the British Union of Fascists’ London headquarters to discuss BUF sterilisation policy.1 Wing-Commander Archibald W H James, a Conservative MP who proposed a Sterilisation Bill, warned Blacker against seeking Fascist support, while suggesting he give them some of the Society’s sterilisation brochures.2

Today, historical figures with eugenics sympathies are being “cancelled”, but it is significant that while G K Chesterton (an outspoken critic of eugenics) has been accused of anti-Semitism and fascist sympathies,3 prominent left-wing figures, including abortion sympathisers, have escaped opprobrium. Far from rejecting eugenics after the Nazi programme became apparent, left-wing scientists merely broadened their scope to include all humanity rather than targeting certain races. Seventy-three million unborn are killed worldwide every year — far exceeding every other cause of death — but the carnage goes largely unremarked, despite abortion disproportionately affecting the poor and/or non-white.

Chesterton said the Great War put the brake on eugenics,4 and when war broke out again, Marie Stopes, a Hitler fanatic,5 who, in 1935, played an active part in the Berlin “racial science” conference,6 nonetheless urged Winston Churchill to bomb Berlin.7 H G Wells attacked the Pope and Catholicism, asking “Why Do We Not Bomb Rome?”8 In 1942, hearing first-hand testimony of the extermination camps, Wells implicitly blamed the victims, saying there was “room for very serious research into the question why anti-Semitism emerges in every country the Jews reside in”.9 C P  Blacker entered the armed forces, but during 1943 and 1944, mulled over an American doctor’s proposal to “eugenically repopulate the entire war area of the allied countries by … artificial insemination”, to stock Europe with “individuals who can be born … free from handicaps of hereditary disease or any other hereditary stigmata”. Blacker called the idea “intrinsically absurd” but believed “the intentions of all the people concerned” were “obviously good”.10

The classic eugenic theory, as he told abortion campaigner Ursula Grant Duff, was that war was “dysgenic” because the “fittest” were the first to volunteer and be killed, while the “unfit” “sat it out” at home and reproduced, to the detriment of the “race”.11 Grant Duff believed that panicking slum-dwellers would cause more damage than foreign invaders, warning that the former would become “hordes of famished nomads — men and women who are dangerous as well as useless because deprived of their means of livelihood. If sufficiently panic-stricken … they [will] not only devour the countryside, but trample it beneath their feet … In a day or two a vagrant and millionfold starvation — grown reckless.” This “widespread invasion by famished plunderers” would be “more terrible, far, than invasion by an army that is fed and disciplined.”12 In the event, however, the despised slum-dwellers kept calm and carried on amid the destruction of their communities and the loss of loved-ones, bearing the brunt of the Blitz — so much so that in September 1940, after Buckingham Palace had been bombed, Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) remarked, “I am glad we have been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East-End in the face.”

Malthusians believed that wars were caused by “overpopulation”, and far fewer people were alive after Hitler’s “population control” project, although the loss did not produce more happiness. Neo-Malthusians like Janet Chance and Stella Browne believed their own approach — preventing births — was far more humane, but feared war’s aftermath — not the sorrow over lost lives, but the increase in new lives: the prospect of a “birth boom” as people reaffirmed their belief in life after the devastation of war. Visiting the UK in 1947 Margaret Sanger controversially called for a moratorium on births; but even during the war, amid the deadly destruction of bombing raids, Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) members continued to give talks about the threat of new life.13

The war was not favourable to their campaign, but when abortion was legalised in 1967, campaigners helped introduce the suction abortion from the Communist countries where it had been developed as an improvement on curettage of the womb; the latter method was used to address menstrual problems, although the Birkett Enquiry heard that it had been used in private nursing homes to perform abortions.14

Before 1967, abortion was not completely unlawful: a legal precedent was set in 1938 by the Bourne case, in which a doctor performed an abortion on a 14-year-old who, it was reported, had been raped by three soldiers. Subsequently, it could be argued that a doctor was operating for the purpose of “preserving the life of the mother” if he believed that continuing the pregnancy would make a woman a “physical or mental wreck”. Cases would still be tried in court but, rather than the doctor having to prove he was acting in good faith, the prosecution would have to prove he was not. 

The leading members of ALRA were eugenics sympathisers, and closely involved in the development of Steel’s Bill; his advisors, Glanville Williams, Dugald Baird, Vera Houghton and Peter Diggory, were deeply involved in eugenics and reproductive campaigning. Steel’s preoccupation with “unwanted children” reflected that of ALRA: in his book Against Goliath, he describes the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, his opponents, as ‘the Society for the Production of Unwanted children’.15 In the debate on the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill, he maintained: “[M]achines are now being developed in the United States which an determine if the chromosomes of a foetus are so severely disordered that no human being recognisable as such could be born as a result of the conclusion of the pregnancy”16

ALRA was closely involved in the Bourne case, and at that time Aleck Bourne, who later joined the pro-life movement,17 was committed to abortion legalisation; his “test case” aimed at changing the law, and subsequently, abortion advocates informed female inquirers of the legal position so they could request one from their doctor. Women were unlikely to be prosecuted for undergoing illegal abortion, since their testimony was needed to prosecute the illegal abortionist. Consequently, David Steel’s law removed possible risk for doctors rather than the women involved. His new law also permitted abortion for eugenic reasons — for fetal disability, and thanks to the “social clause”, effectively for illegitimacy and maternal poverty.

The rewritten history of this campaign functions as a warning against curbing legal abortion, for although many people are unhappy about it, the overarching message is that restrictions would not save babies’ lives but would increase maternal deaths from illegal abortion. However, countries with stricter laws enjoy lower rates of maternal mortality, and following the recent return of abortion law to individual US States, restrictions have saved many unborn lives. In Britain, after legalisation, statistics show that legal abortions began “low and slow” but suddenly shot up and remained high, undermining claims that the many women who, it was said, regularly sought illegal abortion would simply “switch” to the legal sector. As campaigners noted in 1976: “Experience shows that wherever legislation has become more permissive there has been an initial and sustained rise in the number of legal abortions. Easier access and acceptance of abortion enables many women who would not have risked the back street market to terminate their pregnancies.”18 No longer mainly associated with prostitutes and desperate, abandoned girls, it would be sought by law-abiding women. Legalisation sent the message that abortion was the answer to pre-marital pregnancy; and soon, marriage itself would be seen as unnecessary.19

With abortion legal and free, pregnant women could no longer resist attempts at coercion by pleading that it was illegal. Ironically, with abortion pills sent directly to women’s homes, we now see a return to “backstreet abortion”; many will go unrecorded,20 with the true picture emerging only in rising numbers of medical emergencies and the ever-declining birth rate. Abortion campaigners will find it difficult to misrepresent those figures; and as the true history of abortion emerges, it may prove to be the “iceberg” that sinks their ship of lies.

This series will continue next month with Eugenics and the true history of the Abortion Campaign (4).

Notes

  1. Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C332. ↩︎
  2. Letter, C. P. Blacker to Sir Archibald James, October 4, 1933 (Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C190). ↩︎
  3. Leith, S., “The Prince of Paradox: Is it fascist or anti-fascist to quote G. K. Chesterton, or neither?” The Spectator, 1 October 2022.  See: Farmer, A., Chesterton and the Jews: Friend, Critic, Defender (New York: Angelico Press, 2015). ↩︎
  4. See: G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1922). ↩︎
  5. Stopes admired Hitler so much she sent him a book of her poetry in August 1939 (Rose, J., Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 219). ↩︎
  6. The International Congress for Population Science (Kühl, S., The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 32-33). ↩︎
  7. Rose, J., Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 222. ↩︎
  8. See: Wells, H. G., Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1943). ↩︎
  9. “Messenger from Poland”, Channel 4 TV, May 1987, in Coren, M., The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), p. 219. Although disbelief in such testimony was not uncommon, it was typically based on a reluctance to believe that human beings were capable of such atrocities, rather than beliefs about the culpability of the victims. ↩︎
  10. Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/D6. ↩︎
  11. Letter, C. P. Blacker to Ursula Grant Duff, 5 August 1936 (Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C131). ↩︎
  12. Grant Duff, U., “Cannon Fodder”, The New Generation, September 1922. ↩︎
  13. Jenkins, A., Law for the Rich (London: Charles Skilton Ltd., 1964), pp. 62–63. ↩︎
  14. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, evidence to Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry) (MH71-23 AC Paper 54). According to police evidence, curettage had been made “the veil of abortion” (Chester Chief Constable’s Office, evidence to Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry), March 7, 1938 (MH71-24 AC Paper 98)). ↩︎
  15. Against Goliath: D S’s Story (London: Pan, 1991), p. 66). ↩︎
  16. Hansard, July 22, 1966. (See: By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign, Chapter Four, ‘The 1967 Abortion Act and Eugenics’, pp. 153-200). ↩︎
  17. At that time an ALRA member, Bourne later joined the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, and with four other gynaecologists strongly opposed a change in the law, calling for a Royal Commission of Enquiry; see: Bourne, A., A Doctor’s Creed: The Memoirs of a Gynaecologist (London: The Quality Book Club, 1962). ↩︎
  18. Greenwood, V., Young, J., Abortion in Demand (London: Pluto Press, 1976), p. 31, in Paton, D., “The Use of Back Street Abortion Arguments in Favour of Legalized Abortion”, Ethics and Medicine, 1997 13:1, 1997, p. 6. ↩︎
  19. Out-of-wedlock births now predominate in England and Wales. ↩︎
  20. “The official statistics say that there were 2,500 more abortions in 2020, than in 2019. 47% of all the abortions between April and December 2020 were ‘medications at home’, otherwise known as ‘DIY abortions’. Most of these were paid for by the NHS, but ‘carried out’ by private abortion centres. However, in the case of DIY abortions, the woman is counted as having had the abortion once the abortion pills are posted to her. We have spoken with many women who have had the pills sent to them, but have not taken them, and others who have ordered pills ‘Just in case’ they decided to abort. Since there is often no follow-up of these women by the abortion centre, we may never know the real figures for 2020.” (The Good Counsel Network, Mediating Motherhood, Summer 2021). ↩︎

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