Eugenics and the true history of the Abortion Campaign (2)

By Ann Farmer   |   19 February 2025

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

In 1926, the number of deaths attributed to criminal abortion was 431; by 1936 it was 383, falling to 307 the following year;¹ the Birkett Enquiry concluded that “the frequency of abortion has not appreciably increased”. Nonetheless, thanks to campaigners’ hints of “secret knowledge” about the prevalence of backstreet abortion — despite their information coming from secondary sources — even opponents were persuaded of a huge problem, and the Enquiry, whose chairman was an abortion sympathiser,² said the “general impression” in “medical, police, and social circles” was that criminal abortion had recently become “more frequent”.³

However, statistics can be misleading — today, it is sometimes claimed that one in three women have had an abortion, when in fact a smaller proportion have several. In the 1930s, some areas would not see a case of criminal abortion for years, since it tended to be concentrated in poor inner-city areas, the haunt of prostitutes and criminals,⁴ as well as sea ports, where visiting sailors provided a source of income for prostitutes.⁵

Activists’ lurid claims rebounded on them, however, when those not involved in their campaign suggested ways of helping women avoid abortion rather than legalising it. Campaigners argued that for every lethal backstreet abortion there must be many “successful” ones, but by its very nature, abortion was so dangerous that there could be no “huge but invisible” problem: apart from dubious potions, direct interference with the womb risked serious injury or maternal death. Modern-day protesters brandishing wire coat hangers as a warning against restricting legal abortion seem not to realise that in the 1930s, poor women did not frequent the dry cleaners; coat hangers were a luxury, and poor people usually kept their clothes in a chest, or hung them on a hook behind the door, pressing their Sunday outfits by placing them under the mattress. Modern protesters also assume that poor women possessed detailed gynaecological knowledge enabling them to secretly self-abort, when even today tampons include biological diagrams to assist in their application. 

The image of the kindly neighbourhood abortionist⁶ was seriously challenged by a 1963 study of jailed female abortionists, highlighting their astounding ignorance of biology even while boasting of their “success”. One woman said that “[w]hen using the syringe, she ‘just used to feel’, never looked. She didn’t want to embarrass the girl, so she just looked at the ceiling. After she had ‘abortioned’ them, they would ‘come away’ about 24 hours later. With period pains and sort of backache. None of the girls she did were ever ill or died.”⁷ Despite such revelations, the study has been uncritically cited by abortion campaign “historians”.⁸

The not-so-kindly “neighbourhood abortionist” tended to end up in jail, especially as the police, not being swamped with crime, could spare time to prevent it by keeping watch on likely suspects. Most pregnancies occurred within marriage or led to marriage; and perhaps the most telling evidence against the “backstreet-abortion-was-everywhere” narrative is the fact that sexually transmitted diseases were mainly concentrated among prostitutes and their customers, and servicemen abroad, indicating that sex was mainly confined to marriage. In the case of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, if the father was already married, typically, abortion was sought at his suggestion.⁹

Such facts have been overlooked by abortion “historians”; according to one, ALRA vice-chairman Stella Browne “occasionally made references to eugenic considerations to give support to her arguments.”¹⁰ However, with other abortion activists, she shared the Eugenics Society’s worldview. Janet Chance, a banker’s wife, funded the abortion campaign, just as the wealthy Drysdale family funded the Neo-Malthusians. Behind the “compassionate” rhetoric, the private exchanges of abortion campaigners reveal their true motivations. In 1932, left-wing abortion pioneer Dora Russell (wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell) remarked of poor women, “The stupidly animal breed on; but they are not — if we except the feeble-minded — so numerous a class as they were.”¹¹ In a copy of Russell’s book at the feminist Fawcett Library, this remark was underlined, and pencilled in the margin were the words “Omit this sentence”.¹² This exemplifies attitudes to abortion campaign history: most of the facts have been “omitted”. 

The contraception and abortion campaigns have been seen as distinct entities, but abortion campaigners were deeply involved in birth control advocacy and provision and moreover acknowledged the link between contraceptive failure and abortion.¹³ Marie Stopes quietly referred women for abortion, despite her repudiations,¹⁴ and since campaigners demanded contraceptive provision to help poor women avoid backstreet abortion, it would look suspicious if they advocated both. Similarly, abortion campaigners demanded legalisation to avoid the horrors of infanticide; however, there was also a eugenicist campaign for infanticide which, like contraception and abortion, was demanded as a way of purifying the race; moreover, in an age before pre-natal testing for disabilities, its proponents argued that assessing a child at birth was a more reliable way of gauging their eugenic worth. While appearing to favour one approach, typically, campaigners approved of all methods of preventing unfitness, but infanticide was seen as far too shocking by many,¹⁵ and eventually, the hydra-headed campaign succeeded in legalising pre-birth infanticide, claiming it would only be allowed for compassionate reasons in a handful of hard cases, to prevent distress for mothers and a lifetime of suffering for children. 

All three campaigns emerged from the eugenics movement: ALRA co-founder Alice Jenkins was elected a Fellow of the Eugenics Society in 1933,¹⁶ and in addition to the founder of the eugenics movement Sir Francis Galton, she was inspired by Mr Justice McCardie, a judge who openly supported legal abortion — indeed, Jenkins attributed her conversion to the cause to hearing his Galton lecture, entitled “My Outlook on Eugenics”. Jenkins was similarly inspired by a medical consultant’s wife who had had an abortion — who was also attending the lecture.¹⁷ McCardie believed that divorce, sterilisation, birth control and abortion would save the nation from decay; that women should be taught they were not “mere instrument[s] for the reckless begetting of offspring”.¹⁸ He advised that sterilisation be legalised on a “voluntary” basis before making it compulsory,¹⁹ while demanding compulsory abortion for “mental defectives”,²⁰ insisting it was vital to prevent the nation being swamped by a rising tide of “mental deficients”.²¹

Jenkins blamed female suicides on the fact that abortion was illegal,²² and claimed that disabled children were evidence of failed abortion attempts — attempts their mothers were reluctant to admit — complaining that the “embryo, which may be carried to term and born alive, [is] fated to need special treatment, often at public expense, throughout its life”. Her book Law for the Rich — its title a plea for the poor to have “equal access” to abortion²³ — dismissed fears “that our birth-rate might decline if it became available”; it concluded with a warning against overpopulation.²⁴ Despite this, David Steel, author of the 1967 Abortion Act, said Jenkins wrote Law for the Rich motivated by her “hatred of preventable suffering” — words taken from Jenkins’s own foreword.²⁵ 

Stella Browne has been hailed as a radical feminist, but most radicals were interested in economic reform, while feminists were overwhelmingly pro-life — including Mary Wollestonecraft, the first British feminist,²⁶ and Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter Sylvia.²⁷ However, Browne’s Malthusian influences and involvements were typical of abortion campaigners, although her frankness made her a liability to fellow campaigners, who tried to get her to tone down her arguments for legalising abortion. She believed abortion was crucial to female sexual satisfaction — unlike most feminists, who believed men should restrain themselves, and that legalising abortion would encourage the exploitation of women.²⁸

Browne saw “free motherhood” as vital to improve the “race”, since women with unwanted pregnancies transmitted their feelings to the child — thus reconciling eugenics with a “universal” right to abortion. She saw herself as highly evolved — intelligent, bold, politically radical and sexually pro-active — while “motherly” women were “lesser evolved”; she rejected marriage and viewed maternity endowments as “an engine of exploitation and oppression” if used as inducements to “breed”. Under the heading “Low Mental Quality” she echoed the eugenicist argument that aborted children were “not worth having”, arguing that birth control was essential, since family ties — “anxious wives and starving children” — acted as an “emotional lever” preventing men from overthrowing capitalism; however, compulsory abortion and sterilisation could scarcely be reconciled with “free motherhood”.²⁹

Browne told the Birkett Enquiry that she had had an abortion, that the unwanted fetus was of little eugenic value, and denied the unborn child had any right to life, agreeing that it could be destroyed “right up to the moment of birth”.³⁰ But her arguments were merely a “feminised” version of the philosophy advanced by her male influences — sexologist Havelock Ellis, a libertarian eugenicist, and New Generation editor, fellow Canadian R B Kerr, a eugenicist and sexual radical who believed in zero population growth and maintained that “race improvement” depended on women’s rights, divorce and birth control; ALRA duly invited him to become a vice-president. Browne’s approach fits well with today’s campaign, although her views on eugenics and population control have been consigned to historical obscurity. Similarly, the fact that “feminist” campaigners relied on the advice and inspiration of men has been “omitted” from abortion histories. 

Abortion “historians” also overlook the fact that all the “progressive” abortion laws which so inspired English campaigners were based on eugenics sterilisation laws. The Nazi sterilisation laws were modelled on American laws,³¹ and between the two world wars, German, American and English eugenicists — including abortion advocates — enjoyed close links. ALRA’s vice president and advisor Sir Arnold Wilson visited Germany in 1934; he toured Dachau concentration camp, interviewed Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess, and wrote approvingly of a Nazi eugenics exhibition despite its anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism. In 1935, abortion advocate Ursula Grant Duff visited the same exhibition, writing enthusiastically about it to Eugenics Society Secretary C P Blacker; he promptly ordered photographs for propaganda purposes.³² Abortion advocate Cicely Hamilton visited Germany in 1930, before the Nazis came to power but when anti-Semitism was on the rise; and despite devoting a chapter of her book to “Jew-baiting”, she praised most aspects of Germany, especially those relating to Darwinism.³³

The campaigners could not have foreseen the secret Nazi euthanasia programme, under which thousands of people with physical and/or mental disabilities were murdered; with the outbreak of war, the T4 programme accelerated, a preparation for the better-known Holocaust in which six million Jews, and millions of others, perished. However, clearly, killing the disabled was much cheaper even than sterilisation, and in 1910, George Bernard Shaw favoured the lethal chamber, canvassing the ideain his Galton lecture.³⁴ Some English abortion advocates openly supported the lethal chamber for “defectives”: Bertrand Russell envisaged a world government with the power to control population and sterilise the unfit;³⁵ he was fascinated by the ancient Spartan custom of throwing unhealthy newborns into a “deep pit of water”.³⁶ Stella Browne’s inspiration Havelock Ellis saw the rejection of infanticide as an “unfortunate” outcome of Christianity.³⁷

This series will continue next month with Eugenics and the true history of the Abortion Campaign (3).

Notes

1. Inquest cases only; data from The Registrar-General’s Statistical Review of England and Wales (1936), in Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee of Abortion (Birkett Enquiry), Ministry of Health and Home Office (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939), p. 6). ↩︎
2. Sir Norman Birkett KC, officially neutral, at one point protected inquiry member Dorothy Thurtle, also an ALRA member, from questions from a fellow Committee member about her claimed knowledge of backstreet abortion, saving her from further difficulties by reminding Committee members that “questions had better be directed to the witnesses” (Medical Women’s Federation, evidence to Evidence to Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry), (MH71-25, AC Paper 123)). Sir Norman later wrote an introduction to her book Abortion: Right or Wrong? being quoted by Alice Jenkins saying that one of war’s tragedies was that it diverted attention from “pressing social questions to the grimmer business of the moment…” (quoted in Jenkins, A., Law for the Rich (London: Charles Skilton Ltd., 1964), p. 61)). Parry mentions Birkett’s legal defence in a 1928 case, of the manslaughter of a young woman; the accused was found guilty, and police later revealed he was an abortionist operating under the cloak of offering “electric therapy” (Parry, L. A., Criminal Abortion (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson Ltd., 1932), p. 62). ↩︎
3. They judged this from the proportions of total abortions to total births in recent years, and their approximation to the estimate of the British Medical Association; however, regarding increasing prevalence: “This conviction was so widespread among persons competent to form a judgment that we feel bound to accept it as an accurate reflection of the facts” (Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee of Abortion (Birkett Enquiry), Ministry of Health and Home Office (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939), pp. 12-13). ↩︎
4. Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry) (MH71-23 AC Paper 45). ↩︎
5. Chief Constables’ Association of England and Wales, Memorandum to Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry) (MH71-25 AC 120). ↩︎
6. David Gritten “Drama is triumph of Fifties evocation”, Daily Telegraph, 7 September 2004. ↩︎
7. Woodside, M., “Attitudes of Women Abortionists”, 11th Howard Journal 93, 1963, pp. 93-112. ↩︎
8. Simms, M., Hindell, K., Abortion Law Reformed (London: Peter Owen, 1971), p. 36. ↩︎
9. See: Woodside, M., ‘Attitudes of Women Abortionists’, 11th Howard Journal 93, 1963, pp. 93-112. ↩︎
10. Rowbotham, S., A New World for Women: Stella Browne – Socialist Feminist (London: Pluto Press, 1977), p. 19. ↩︎
11. Russell, D., In Defence of Children (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1932), p. 37. ↩︎
12. Fawcett Library, London (shelf-mark 305.23). ↩︎
13. Abortion advocate Malcolm Potts stated: “As people turn to contraception, there will be a rise, not a fall, in the abortion rate”; a prominent abortion campaigner and provider, Potts was also committed to eugenics and population control (Cambridge Evening News, 7 February 1973). ↩︎
14. Hall, R., Marie Stopes: A biography (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977), p. 41. ↩︎
15. See: Pernick, M. S., The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of ‘Defective’ Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). ↩︎
16. Letter, Alice Jenkins to C P Blacker, February 2, 1951 (Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C192). ↩︎
17. Jenkins, A., Law for the Rich (London: Charles Skilton Ltd., 1964), pp. 28-29. ↩︎
18. Brookes, B., Abortion in England 1800-1967 (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 18. ↩︎
19. Letter, the Hon. Sir Henry A. McCardie to the Eugenics Society, December 13, 1931 (Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C125). ↩︎
20. Claud Mullins, “Abortion: a case for inquiry”, The Adelphi, vol.3, October 1931-March 1932, pp. 340-344, in Brookes, B., Abortion in England 1800-1967 (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 38. ↩︎
21. “Further vigorous criticism of the law concerning abortion was expressed by Mr Justice McCardie, at Leeds Assizes yesterday. He said he was convinced of the need for the widest possible knowledge of birth control among the poor and suffering. …referring to mental deficients and certain others” (Leeds Mercury, December 12, 1931); “Are we all going mad? Breeding a Nation of Idiots: 300,000 that were better unborn”, N. B. Ordiner, Yorkshire Weekly Post, 19 December 1931. ↩︎
22. Jenkins, A., Law for the Rich (London: Charles Skilton Ltd., 1964), p. 34. ↩︎
23. Ibid, pp. 77–79. ↩︎
24. Ibid, p. 81. ↩︎
25. Steel, D., Against Goliath: David Steel’s Story (London: Pan, 1991), p. 60. ↩︎
26. “To satisfy this genus of men [the “lustful prowler”] women are made systematically voluptuous … Women becoming, consequently, weaker, in mind and body, than they ought to be, were one of the grand ends of their being taken into account, that of bearing and nursing children, have not sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a mother; and sacrificing to lasciviousness the parental affection, that ennobles instinct, either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born” (Wollestonecraft, M., Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1792/1985), p. 249). ↩︎
27. “It is grievous indeed that the social collectivity should feel itself obliged to assist in so ugly an expedient as abortion in order to mitigate its crudest evils. The true mission of Society is to provide the conditions, legal, moral, economic and obstetric, which will assure happy and successful motherhood” (Pankhurst, S., Save the Mothers (London: Alfred A. Knopf Ltd., 1930), p. 110). ↩︎
28. Dorothy Thurtle, an Enquiry member, intervened whenever fellow ALRA members were questioned too closely, or their responses strayed from the path of ALRA policy: when Stella Browne insisted that women had a right to sexual relationships, and that any woman who did not want to be pregnant should be able to have an abortion, Thurtle suggested that women only got abortions if “really driven desperate”, to which Browne responded: “Yes.” Later, she agreed with Thurtle’s suggestion that the “largest number of abortions take place among women … in a pretty desperate economic condition” (Evidence to Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry), 17 November 1937 (MH71-23 AC Paper 51)). ↩︎
29. Browne, S., “Death by Maternity”, The New Generation, November 1922. ↩︎
30. Evidence on behalf of ALRA to Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry) (MH71-21, AC Paper 25). ↩︎
31. See: Kühl, S., The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Black, E., War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. 2004). https://ifamnews.com/en/eugenics-and-the-american-roots-of-the-nazi-gas-chambers?mc_cid=f7d1623efa&mc_eid=e406f0c25a ↩︎
32. Trombley, S., The Right to Reproduce: A History of Coercive Sterilization (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 117. ↩︎
33. For example, “The Cult of the Bare” extolled nudism, a feature of Nazism’s worship of the body (Hamilton, C., Modern Germanies as seen by an Englishwoman (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1931), pp. 12-14). A retired actress, Hamilton approved of a play depicting the horrors of backstreet abortion (she noted that the German theatre was often used for propaganda) claiming the play was well received, although in one instance local Nazis broke up the performance; she also noted Hitler’s and Mussolini’s “pro-natalism” (Ibid, p. 46). ↩︎
34. The Mayor of Brighton caused controversy the previous year for advocating that “the unfit” be put to death on three doctors’ signatures (Weeks, J., Sex, Politics and Society: The regulation of sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1989), p. 135). ↩︎
35. Russell, B., Marriage and Morals (London: Unwin, 1929/1976), p. 167. ↩︎
36. Russell, B., History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and SocialCircumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Geo. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1946/1961), p. 119. ↩︎
37. Ellis, H., ‘The Control of Population’ in On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue, 2 Vols. in One (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co., 1937), pp. 169-170 (originally published as More Essays of Love and Virtue (1931)) in Stone, D., Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p. 76. ↩︎