Cancel Test: What if Marie Stopes was a Nazi sympathiser?

When someone plays the Nazi card, everything goes to hell.

This is common cause, not least because the original Nazis were the most depraved, genocidal, murderous racists of modern times. It is impossible to use Nazis as a metaphor because nothing else could approach the levels of evil that they committed.

However, the Nazis continue to come up in conversation. It was recently brought to my attention that Marie Stopes, founder of the international contraceptive and abortion services clinics that bore her name, was a believer in eugenics, and in fact wrote letters to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

So egregious was this revelation, that the clinics themselves have changed their name. They are now called MSI Reproductive Clinics.

Stopes was the founder of the first birth control clinic in Britain. As such, she helped lay the foundation for modern family planning and the liberation of women from traditional gender roles, giving them control of their own reproductive life.

Birth control is one of the cornerstones of modern progressive values. It literally set women free from being constantly pregnant and/or raising children. It liberated them to be in charge of their own destinies, and allowed society to benefit from their insightful contributions.

Society is infinitely better off because of birth control. One could make a similar case for abortion services, though this might be a more disputed issue. Suffice to say that abortion also allows women to have control of when and whether they give birth, allowing them sovereignty of their own lives.

However, it turns out that the founder of one of the world’s preeminent providers of birth control and abortion services, Ms Stopes, was into birth control for altogether unpleasant reasons.

It appears that Stopes believed in birth control as a means to prevent degenerate, feeble-minded, and unbalanced people from having children. She supported the compulsory sterilisation of those deemed unfit for parenthood. She officially opposed abortion.

Apparently, Stopes opposed mixed marriages and believed children of mixed race should be sterilised at birth.

Her views were essentially eugenics, a belief system from the previous century that aimed to improve the strength of purity of the human race by preventing people deemed weaker or undesirable from breeding. It’s a type of scientific racism.

Stopes bequeathed her clinics to the Eugenics Society, and sent a copy of one of her books to another adherent of eugenics – Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, of whom she was apparently a supporter.

This kind of social alignment is simply beyond the pale by today’s standards. It was indeed a belief in a “master race” that informed Hitler and the Nazis’ attempt to subjugate the planet to their will and to try to eliminate the entire Jewish nation through genocide.

The birth control organisation she founded has quite rightly distanced itself from her name.

However, they have not distanced themselves from her legacy. Her contribution to society has been the liberation of women and the enrichment of the world by allowing them to realise their potential. Her work remains of immense value to society, no matter how distasteful her political and racial views were.

The principle followed by the MSI clinics, and indeed anyone who continues to believe in birth control and the agency of women over their own bodies, is that the creation should be separated from the creator.

If we can do this with Marie Stopes, perhaps we can do the same with others whose works have been magnificent while their private lives and personal values have been offensive, and downright criminal.

If the work of eugenicist Nazi sympathiser Marie Stopes lives on, what price the output of trans-exclusionary radical feminist JK Rowling? Not-so-nice person Ellen de Generes? How about sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein? Sexual predator R Kelly? Every womanising rock star of the 60s and 70s?

Is it possible that the people can be jailed for their offences, but their creations, their works of art, possibly their few shining moments of greatness, may be preserved to enrich society?

Perhaps it is. We are imperfect people, every one of us. Some of us are actually pretty repulsive. But somewhere in every one of us is something good. While the wrong must be decried and corrected, perhaps we can preserve that little bit of good that each of us is able to do, and keep it alive, so that we may all learn from it and become inspired, uplifted, better.

Perhaps it’s a kind of cultural eugenics.

Hagen Engler. Picture: Supplied

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