Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 74(4) Nov 2024

Papers

The Catholic fight against Eugenics in Britain

by Mark H. SutherlandHalliday Sutherland

Catholic opposition of birth control in Britain one hundred years ago is today presented as “Catholics against Contraceptives”. A grandson of Dr Halliday Sutherland – defendant in Stopes v Sutherland 1923 – argues that the Church opposed a broad agenda that included eugenic breeding and the compulsory sterilisation of the poor.

In 1921, Dr Marie Stopes opened the Mothers’ Clinic in Holloway. In 1922, she sued Dr Halliday Sutherland, alleging that he had defamed her in his 1922 book Birth Control. Sutherland had insufficient funds to fight the case so, win or lose, he faced financial ruin. He did have invaluable moral support though; when Cardinal Bourne (then Archbishop of Westminster) heard of the case, he promised Sutherland to “stand by him to the end”.

Stopes v Sutherland was heard in the High Court in 1923. Eminent physicians testified for both sides: Sir James Barr, Sir William Arbuthnot Lane and Sir William Bayliss for Stopes and Professor Louise McIlroy, Dame Mary Sharlieb and Sir Maurice Anderson for Sutherland. Judgement was awarded to the defendants.

Stopes appealed, winning damages of £100. Sutherland appealed and the case went to the House of Lords (then Britain’s highest court). The Law Lords gave judgement for the defendants, with costs.

Since then, the biographers and disciples of Stopes have dominated the historical accounts, creating an ‘accepted’ narrative, summarised here on a BBC History website:

“In 1921, Stopes opened a family planning clinic in Holloway, north London, the first in the country. It offered a free service to married women and also gathered data about contraception. In 1925, the clinic moved to central London and others opened across the country ….. The Catholic church was Stopes's fiercest critic. In 1923, Stopes sued Catholic doctor Halliday Sutherland for libel. She lost, won at appeal and then lost again in the House of Lords, but the case generated huge publicity for Stopes's views … Stopes continued to campaign for women to have better access to birth control…”[2]

In short, Stopes’ campaigned to bring contraceptives, family planning and reproductive choice to women in the face of attacks from the Catholic Church.

I am a grandson of Dr Sutherland and I wondered why he had opposed Stopes so vehemently. After all, in those times, women might give birth to nine, ten, eleven or more children who, if they survived, struggled in the grim slums of Britain’s industrial cities.

In 2013, I rediscovered Dr Sutherland’s personal papers and began my research, helped by my brother and co-author. I read accounts of the trial, learned the law of defamation and read the court transcript. I studied Dr. Sutherland’s personal papers, Stopes’ papers in the British and Wellcome Libraries and the archives of Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster.

I learned that Stopes v Sutherland was a battle in the Catholic campaign against a broad agenda that included eugenic breeding and the compulsory sterilisation of the poor.

Stopes’ Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress drew support from the intelligentsia including: Bertrand Russell, J.M. Keynes, G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells. It aimed to:

“… secure conception to those married people who are healthy, childless, and desire children, as it is to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood.” [3]

“Racially diseased” referred to inherited conditions which, at the time, included tuberculosis (a disease of poverty that killed 70,000 Britons each year). Stopes, a doctor of science, described those “unfitted for parenthood” in language that was, at best, unscientific: “hordes of defectives”,“parasites”,“the spawn of drunkards”, “hopelessly bad cases, bad through inherent disease, or drunkenness or character”,“wastrels, the diseased…the miserable [and] the criminal”, and the “degenerate, feeble minded and unbalanced”.

Dr Sutherland argued that tuberculosis was an infectious disease that could, with early detection and treatment, be curedDr Sutherland began to oppose eugenics when he was “in theory an agnostic and in practice an atheist.”[4] He argued that tuberculosis was an infectious disease that could, with early detection and treatment, be cured. Eugenicists, such as Sir James Barr, ex-president of the British Medical Association, disagreed:

“Until we have some restriction in the marriage of undesirables the elimination of the tubercle bacillus is not worth aiming at. It forms a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit ... if tomorrow the tubercle bacillus were non-existent, it would be nothing short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance.” [5]

BandstandIn Radiant Motherhood (1921), Stopes urged Parliament to pass laws “to ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased” through compulsory sterilisation,[6] and sent a copy to Prime Minister Lloyd George.

When Stopes opened the Mothers’ Clinic, Barr congratulated her for inaugurating:

“… a great movement which I hope will eventually get rid of our C3 population and exterminate poverty. The only way to raise an A1 population is to breed them.”[7

Sutherland viewed eugenicists as “race-breeders with the souls of cattle breeders” and believed that their efforts would enslave Britons. While biographers of Stopes cited the libellous words in Birth Control, they uniformly ignored his warning in the paragraph that followed:

“If, instead of bearing children, women practice birth control, and if children are to be denied to the poor as a privilege of the rich, then it would be very easy to exploit the women of the poorer classes … The English poor have already lost even the meaning of the word “property,” and if the birth controllers had their way the meaning of the word “home” would soon follow. The aim of birth control is generally masked by falsehood, but the urging of this policy on the poor points unmis- takably to the Servile State”[8]

I used to believe the ‘accepted’ history about my grandfather. No one, family or otherwise, told me differently and I guessed that, if family didn’t know, no one else would. I wrote Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (in conjunction with Neil Sutherland) to correct the historical record. It will, I hope, lay the false “Catholics against contraceptives” narrative to rest.

Exterminating Poverty

References

  1. The author of this article, Mark Halliday Sutherland, is the grandson of Dr Halliday Gibson Sutherland who curates hallidaysutherland.com.
  2. See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/stopes_marie_carmichael.shtml viewed 17 June 2019.
  3. “The Tenets of the CBC” were published in Appendix C of “The Authorised Life of Marie C. Stopes” by Aylmer Maud. Williams & Norgate Ltd, Covent Garden 1924. See https://archive.org/de- tails/b29977587/page/222 viewed 19 June 2019.
  4. Sutherland, H. (1956). Irish Journey. London: Geoffrey Bles. Page 11.
  5. Barr, S. J. (1918, September 21). The future of the medical profession. British Medical Journal, 318-321. Retrieved July 16, 2018, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2341 835/
  6. Stopes M. Radiant Motherhood (1923)
  7. Stopes, M. (1921). Queen's Hall Meeting on Constructive Birth Control: Speeches and Impressions. London: G.P. Putnam's Sons Ltd. Second edition.
  8. Sutherland, H. (1922). Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the
    Neo-Malthusians. London: Harding & More.
    Page 102. See: https://archive.org/details/birthcontrolstat00suth/page/102/ viewed 21 June 2019.