An image not to be honoured (From The Northern Echo)

An image not to be honoured

11:53am Tuesday 9th September 2008

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WOULD you like to see a Nazi sympathiser’s head on a British postage stamp? Well, whether you would or you wouldn’t, you’re going to get one.

The family planning pioneer Marie Stopes is to be featured on a new stamp as a “woman of distinction”.

To describe Marie Stopes as a family planner is rather like saying that Hitler was a kindly European statesman. She campaigned to have the poor, the sick and people of mixed race sterilised.

Stopes was also an admirer of Hitler. In August 1939, a couple of weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, she wrote a loving letter to Adolf, enclosing a selection of her poems: “Dear Herr Hitler, Love is the greatest thing in the world, so will you accept from me these poems....”

In 1919 she wrote to ask the National Birth Rate Commission to approve forced sterilisation of any who were “diseased, drunk or of bad character” and she coined the slogan “Joyful and deliberate motherhood. A safe light in our racial darkness”. And in 1925 she attended the Nazis’ International Congress for Population Science in Berlin. In such conferences was the beginning of the totalitarian policies which led to the genocide of the Jews and the killing of those members of the population judged to be “imperfect” in body or mind.

Stopes was nothing if not consistent and extended her vile doctrines even to her own family.

For instance, she cut her son Harry out of her will after he married a near-sighted woman – actually the daughter of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb deployed by the Dambusters. She planned to adopt a child herself but first stipulated that “...the boy must be completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised”.

How many of us would be alive today if those strictures had applied to us all when we were infants? Of course she faced opposition.

Most people don’t like the idea of their lives being run – or cut short – by a centralised medical police. The word for Stopes’ evil policies is “eugenics” – a science regarded as hateful today but vigorously supported by many leading intellectuals in the early 20th Century, including Bertrand Russell, HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw.

Stopes knew she would have a hard task to persuade the British public of the rightness of her views, but she set herself to the job single- mindedly. In November 1922 she wrote in Birth Control News: “May I point out that the sterilisation by law, although perhaps a novel idea to the insular Briton, has been in existence in the other great English-speaking nation for a long time? Fifteen States in the USA enacted sterilisation laws before the year 1920. The knowledge that others have taken this important national step may perhaps make it easier for English men and women to consider the subject freed from that shrinking fear induced by anything that is too novel.”

What she called “shrinking fear” is in reality our entirely justified deep repugnance towards social policies which involve decisions about who is fit to live and who isn’t. The managers of the Royal Mail deserve to be condemned for their honouring Marie Stopes. I shall look carefully at my stamps next time I’m in the post office and if I see one with Stopes’ face on it, I shall ask for a replacement.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

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