The gospel of eugenics

By Liam Gibson   |   22 January 2025

For anyone trying to understand the scandal of the UK’s “grooming” gangs, one of the most difficult questions to answer is how the systematic exploitation of hundreds of young girls could be so widely reported and yet be allowed to continue for decades. In fact, it is far from certain that such abuse has come to an end. But while Keir Starmer’s government remains determined to prevent an enquiry into this national disgrace, there is no reason to believe that those in the police, social services and child protection agencies who allowed it to happen will ever be held to account. 

Much of the public debate has been overshadowed by the racial component of the story — almost all the perpetrators are of a Pakistani-Muslim origin while most of the victims are from the so-called white working class. Those who should have stopped the abuse chose instead to sweep the matter under the carpet. Officials in towns and cities across England were, it seems, more concerned with avoiding accusations of racism or the potential damage done to community relations, so they chose to do nothing. Of course, it would be impossible to deny that the ethnic and religious background of the perpetrators played a role in perpetuating the abuse, however, the policies and attitudes that gave rise to this horrific situation stretch back far beyond the era of mass immigration.

The doctor of German philosophy

In February 1925, Marie Carmichael Stopes, England’s leading eugenicist, published The First Five Thousand: The First Report of the First Birth Control Clinic in the British Empire. While she had originally intended to issue the booklet when the milestone of 10,000 customers of “the Mothers’ Clinic for Constructive Birth Control” had passed through its doors, Stopes decided that: “… as so much misinformation has been given currency recently, it seems wise to present certain preliminary results based on the first five thousand cases…”¹

The “misinformation” to which Stopes is referring is the negative publicity that resulted from her failed libel action against Dr Halliday Sutherland the previous year. Even before his recent conversion to the Catholic faith, Sutherland had been an opponent of eugenics. In 1922, he published Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians. In a passage that identifies Stopes without mentioning her by name, he lists the evils of contraception arguing that it is “specially hurtful to the poor”.

“(b) Exposing the Poor to Experiment.

“Secondly, the ordinary decent instincts of the poor are against these practices and indeed they have used them less than any other class. But owing to their poverty, lack of learning and helplessness, the poor are the natural victims of those who seek to make experiments on their fellows. In the midst of a London slum a woman who is a doctor of German philosophy (Munich), has opened a Birth Control Clinic, where working women are taught a method of contraception described by Professor [Anne Louise] McIlroy[Anne Louise McIlroy was the first woman Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at London University. She practiced at the Royal Free Hospital for Women.] as ‘The most harmful method of which I have had experience … it is truly amazing that this monstrous campaign of birth control should be tolerated by the Home Secretary.”²

It was this passage that Stopes alleged was libellous. Despite claiming that her reputation had been damaged, she made no secret of her wish to target the poorest of the poor. Indeed, she can barely disguise her contempt for the lower classes when she laments that the “better and thriftier” couples “have to restrict their families while those below the level of self-respect, often even decency, reproduce themselves innumerably”. 

When Sutherland first received the writ for defamation, he had no means of paying lawyers to fight the case. And when urged by a sympathetic journalist to ask the Catholic Church for help, he rejected the advice. He had only entered the Church in 1919, and besides, his criticisms of Stopes were not of a religious nature. Nevertheless, the journalist reached out to the Diocese of Westminster on his behalf. The response from the Archbishop’s private secretary was: “Tell Dr Sutherland that Cardinal Bourne will stand by him to the end.”³

Having lost her case in the High Court, Stopes won on appeal when Sutherland and his publishers were ordered to pay a substantial sum in costs. Finally, the case made its way to the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords where four of the five judges found that Sutherland had shown that his comments were justified.

Although Stopes’ efforts to eliminate poverty by eliminating poor families met with less success than her US counterparts, her campaign changed the image of contraception.⁴ Her influential supporters spread the fiction that Stopes was a champion of women’s rights and a pioneer of birth control. In reality, the contraceptive methods promoted by the Mothers’ Clinic were already well-known and used by both the middle classes and prostitutes. What really set Stopes apart was her motivation; the paranoid fear that the “slave-mothers” producing “myriads of weak, inefficient, diseased and miserable lives” would outbreed the social elite. By the end of the Second World War, revulsion at the crimes of German eugenicists had tarnished the image of the movement across the globe. While the goals remained the same, new slogans were required.

The parental state

By the 1960s, the fears of the 1920s had been replaced by the cause of Women’s Liberation. And after the introduction of “the pill” the supply of birth control to married women became routine. But another Fellow of the Eugenics Society was prepared to go even further. In 1963, Lady Helen Brook, set out to provide single women with contraception.⁵ Naturally, a major consequence of this policy was an increase in pregnancies to single mothers. While relatively small by today’s standards, the steady increase in young women becoming pregnant and, after 1967 seeking abortions, became the focus of a manufactured moral panic and the pretext to demand wider access to birth control. However, Stopes’ deep-seated contempt for the least well off was still evident even decades later. In a letter published by The Times, in February 1980, Brook advocated a new relationship between children, parents and the State.

“[T]here are countless men and women, parents, who are too selfish, too ignorant, too lazy to be bothered about their children’s general education. From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental state to take major decisions—objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child.”⁶

Just two years later, the power of the parental state was enshrined in English common law by the High Court. Victoria Gillick, a Catholic mother of five young daughters, asked the court to review the policy that allowed local health authorities to supply girls under 16 (the legal age of consent) with contraception while concealing the fact from their parents. Gillick lost the case but successfully appealed the judgement. The Department of Health immediately announced that it would take the case to the House of Lords but, until the Law Lords made their decision, the ruling from the Court of Appeal would stand. In October 1985, the House of Lords came down on the side of the government and the birth control lobby. By three to two, the judges ruled that girls under 16 could be supplied with contraception without the permission of their parents. Yet, despite the dire predictions, during the ten months that the Appeal Court order was in place, there was no evidence of a rise in underage conceptions. Although the attendance of under-16s at birth control centres fell by 30 per cent, there was no increase in pregnancy or abortion rates in that age group.

Unlike the Sutherland case, Victoria Gillick received little support from the Catholic hierarchy. When the case was over, Basil Cardinal Hume wrote to the Minister of State for Health expressing the hope that the government would ensure that the provision of birth control to underage girls would be the exception rather than the norm. He also hoped that the policy would not be extended to the authorisation of abortion under the cloak of confidentiality. He concluded:

“I would welcome the opportunity of making a positive contribution to the public discussion on the new guidance of the DHSS [Department of Health and Social Services]. I have always had grave doubts about the wisdom of using the courts on these particular issues to protect parental rights and the welfare of the young.”⁷

The Cardinal’s hopes were to meet with disappointment. The government simply wasn’t interested in any contribution Church leaders wished to make. To the surprise of no one, the strategy of writing emollient letters to Ministers of State failed to halt the series of aggravated assaults on family life that continue to this day.

In 2006, the courts upheld the right of underage girls to access abortion without parental knowledge under the same conditions as they obtained contraception. The inevitable increase in the levels of teenage pregnancy, abortion and the explosion of sexually transmitted infections have been well documented.⁸ Nevertheless, successive British governments have demonstrated their unwavering commitment to the legacy of Marie Stopes. 

In half a dozen towns and cities across the length and breadth of England, serious case reviews have pieced together a picture of the endemic abuse of girls as young as twelve.⁹ These children were provided with birth control by GPs, school nurses or sexual health advisors. They were groomed first by classroom sex-education programmes that left them vulnerable to the gangs of men who supplied them with drugs and alcohol and then subjected them to abuse tantamount to torture. Some of these girls were regarded by the authorities as child prostitutes, pathologically promiscuous or simply making bad choices.

How could this situation be allowed to go on for so long? For 100 years, the ideology of eugenics has been permitted to sink deep roots into British society. At the heart of this ideology lies a contempt for the families of the poorest and least well-off. The hatred revealed by the statements of Stopes and Brook is an integral aspect of the movement they led and is still an influence on their disciples. When Sutherland accused Stopes of experimenting on the poor he was speaking primarily of an unnatural social experiment. The victims of England’s grooming gangs have been the collateral damage of that ongoing experiment.

It was not a coincidence that both Stopes and Brook were vehemently hostile to Catholicism; the two faiths are incompatible. Only when Catholic leaders realise that they can’t comply their way out of tyranny will Catholic children in Catholic schools be safe from the corrupting gospel of eugenics.

Notes

1. Marie C Stopes, The First Five Thousand: The First Report of the First Birth Control Clinic in the British Empire (John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1925) p 14–5. ↩︎
2. Halliday G. Sutherland, Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians (Harding & More,1922) cited inMark H Sutherland, Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it. (Kindle, 2020) p 65. ↩︎
3. Exterminating Poverty, p 77. Stopes’ contempt for the poor was only surpassed by her hatred of the Catholic Church. Before the libel case began, she urged her legal team to subpoena Cardinal Bourne to give evidence during the trial. Her barrister rejected the idea. ↩︎
4. Unlike North America and most of Protestant Europe, Britain never introduced compulsory sterilisation. ↩︎
5. “Helen’s mother had converted to Roman Catholicism and sent her daughter to be educated at the Convent of the Holy Child Jesus in Mark Cross, Sussex. Helen loathed the Catholic Church and once adult converted to the Church of England.” — HCG Matthews & Brian Harrison, (eds) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol 7 (OUP, 2004) p 875. ↩︎
6. Lady Helen Brook, Letter to The Times, 16 February 1980. ↩︎
7. Cardinal Hume, letter to Rt Hon Barney Hayhoe MP, 1 November 1985. ↩︎
8. “Easier access to family planning reduces the effective cost of sexual activity and will make it more likely (at least for some teenagers) that they will engage in underage sexual activity.” David Paton, “Underage conceptions and abortions in England and Wales 1969–2009: the role of public policy”, [2012] Education and Health, 30, 2. ↩︎
9. For an analysis of the problem see: Norman Wells, Unprotected: How the normalisation of underage sex is exposing children and young people to the risk of sexual exploitation (Family Education Trust, 2017). ↩︎