Voice of the Family

A LAY INITIATIVE FORMED TO DEFEND

CATHOLIC TEACHING ON THE FAMILY

The Politics of Abortion (1)

By Ann Farmer   |   23 July 2025

This is the seventh of a twelve-part series, which began with Eugenics and the true history of the Abortion Campaign (1).

As seen, the historical campaign for abortion has been portrayed as feminist, although it emerged from eugenics population control; it was also inspired by other countries’ abortion laws, all eugenics-based, and by Communist Russia’s. Even after the harsh reality of Communism was exposed in Eastern Europe, left-wing support for abortion grew.1

Long before this, the British working classes showed little interest in the Marxist vision, preferring the material fruits of capitalism, or alternatively, home-grown socialism, said to be influenced more by Methodism than Marxism, taking its inspiration from the early Christian communities, where “all goods were held in common” (cf. Acts 2: 44–45), rather than the socially libertarian “Bloomsbury” leftism where “all wives were held in common”. English socialism was inspired by William Morris and the neo-medievalism of the nineteenth century, by nostalgia for a vanished Eden, and by William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem”, rather than the communist utopia which, on closer inspection, resembled a dystopia, as Communist “aristocrats” enjoyed a privileged lifestyle while the masses endured equality of poverty.2 Much later, the British Marxist left — based in the university rather than the factory and the pub — no longer placed their faith in the “inevitable revolution”; tired of waiting for “the masses” to overthrow capitalism, they turned to undermining the foundations of Western society, specifically “bourgeois” institutions like the family, and even life itself — an approach which impacted most heavily on the masses.

As the 1917 Russian Revolution demonstrated, Marxists saw democracy as a stepping-stone to permanent power, and after the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and 30s, the progressive liberal left feared that the workers might vote for fascism. However, while warning about right-wing politics leading to fascism, they remained largely silent on the dangers of democracy leading to Communism.

As to the Labour Party’s stance on abortion, the Eugenics Society’s Secretary C P Blacker told ALRA co-founder Janet Chance that her colleague Stella Browne had shown him “a document entitled ‘The Legalisation of Abortion’”, which ALRA “proposed sending to Secretaries of Women’s Co-operative Groups”; Browne had asked for his “opinion of this document”, and Blacker advised Chance that “it would be a mistake to send the letter direct to Secretaries of branches without first consulting the Secretary of the whole organisation. The odds are in favour of your hitting upon a Roman Catholic local General Secretary”.3

Regarding sterilisation, the Eugenics Society wrote to Mr Justice McCardie, a Eugenics Society Fellow who inspired ALRA co-founder Alice Jenkins, asking him to moderate his Galton lecture, as several Labour MPs believed the Sterilisation Bill to be anti-working class; they urged him to stress “that the aim of this Society is not to harass or forcibly suppress the poor, but rather to convey to them knowledge which at present is more or less inevitably the monopoly of the rich.”4 However, fears that the abortion campaign was a campaign by the wealthy against the poor were borne out by Janet Chance’s suggestion to Blacker that they meet to discuss abortion campaign tactics on his yacht.5

Campaigners insisted that legalisation was a social justice issue, but poor people, though they may have envied the wealth of the rich, did not aspire to their “family values” (or lack thereof); indeed, in an ironic reversal, the poor looked down upon the morals of the rich. Activists disagreed on whether to demand abortion as a universal right, or solely for the poor; both approaches were problematical, since “abortion for all” raised fears of encouraging promiscuity, while “abortion for the poor” sounded too much like the eugenics policy it really was. Leading campaigner Dora Russell, second wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell, told ALRA that, for tactical reasons, they should avoid campaigning for abortion solely for poor women; Norman MacDonald of the University Labour Federation agreed, as did Conservative MP Sir Arnold Wilson. In an age when induced abortion was regarded as an appalling aberration, demanding it for poor women smacked of eugenics; and in private, ALRA and the Eugenics Society co-operated closely on tactics.6

Dora Russell, although the wife of an Earl, was an executive member of the Independent Labour Party and even more incredibly, a member of the Workers’ Birth Control Group. Russell, whose worldview was shaped by evolutionary theories, was an influential, privileged left-wing “progressive”, as were popular author H G Wells — a sexual libertarian, although from humbler stock — and Beatrice and Sydney Webb, who with playwright George Bernard Shaw were among the founders of the London School of Economics and prominent members of the socialist Fabian Society. Beatrice Webb applauded Shaw’s approval of “Human Breeding”,7 while her husband Sydney feared the population was being increased from “inferior stocks”.8 Wells believed that to give the “lower” classes equality would be “to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped by their fecundity.”9

Bertrand Russell warned against the racial deterioration of the European nations if “the worst half of the population [became] the parents of more than half of the next generation”.10 Dora Russell warmed to population control at Cambridge University, before becoming a socialist,11 and became a Vice-President of the Malthusian League.12 She believed that “the important task of modern feminism” was “to accept and proclaim sex”;13 closely involved in the World League for Sexual Reform, to which reproductive control was integral, she organised a private showing of a Russian abortion film, describing the experience as a “joyous lark”.14 Disdaining domestic life, the servant-employing Russell believed that children aged two and over should live in nurseries, cared for by “specialists”.15

The Russells believed that “overpopulation” caused war,16 and Bertrand’s approach to family matters was shaped by eugenics as well as Malthusianism, supporting family allowances only for the “fit”; children should be the property and concern of mothers, he believed, but the State should play a greater role, especially in the “wage-earning classes”, making fathers “redundant” and forcing mothers to work, their children placed in an “institution”. Bertrand envisaged a world government, with the power to control population and to sterilise “the unfit” — something he saw as immediately doable. He believed that if women ceased to be “respectable”, men would not need prostitutes,17 echoing notorious eighteenth-century womaniser and adventurer Giacomo Casanova, who remarked gratefully, “There is no need for harlots in this fortunate age. So many decent women are as obliging as one could wish.”18 The Russells combined sexual radicalism with eugenics: in their “open marriage”, Dora had two children by Bertrand and then became pregnant by another man,19 but decided to continue the pregnancy because “no chance of a child for a man of such brilliance must be missed”;20 however, for the “proletarian mothers” who bore “many children of a very poor quality”, she favoured not welfare measures but abortion.21

Dora’s friend Dr Joan Malleson wanted destitute women to have free abortions; she saw illegal abortion deaths as a “sadder” figure than deaths in childbirth, and suggested sending ALRA literature to a recently convicted illegal abortionist.22 As seen, abortion and contraception campaigner Dorothy Thurtle, yet another Eugenics Society member, entered local government in London’s East End expressly to establish birth control clinics. Daughter of Labour Party leader George Lansbury, and wife of Labour MP Ernest Thurtle,23 she claimed that without contraception and abortion, poor women would produce enormous families.24 Frida Laski, another friend of Dora Russell’s, also had Labour Party links; she too entered local government solely to establish birth control clinics in South London.25 With Russell, Laski sat on the Worker’s Sterilisation Committee, which was subsidised by the Eugenics Society;26 her husband Harold, Labour Party Chairman and Professor of political science at the London School of Economics, set up a Galton club at Oxford.27 The couple met through a mutual interest in eugenics, and Frida later became a Fellow of the Eugenics Society.28

Despite the emphasis on poor women — echoed by abortion historians — the campaign was by the rich, for the poor. Unlike wealthy people who funded poverty relief and/or the provision of public amenities, the only “remedy” for poverty promoted by ALRA’s privileged members was abortion. As Janet Chance’s wealthy husband Clinton explained, the Eugenics Society’s solution to poverty was the eradication of the poor. Abortion activists’ driving force was a preoccupation with eugenics population control, and this preoccupation pre-dated the abortion campaign. Much later, abortion advocates Malcolm Potts, Peter Diggory and John Peel, all eugenics population control sympathisers, believed the backstreet abortionist performed a public service by eliminating “the unfit” before birth — “one of the most unusual of public servants”.29

Although, as seen in a previous article, some abortion campaign pioneers had links with Nazi Germany and fascism, more recently, “the right to abortion” has become an article of faith on the left. The 1930s Labour Party had been antagonistic or simply uninterested, but the 1960s was a political watershed on the abortion issue, which until then had not been an issue at all, political or otherwise — indeed, in 1964, Alice Jenkins had to explain what the word meant, emphasising induced abortion rather than the common understanding of an early miscarriage.30 However, when Labour won the 1966 General Election, their new intake of MPs, many from a middle-class, professional background, supported Liberal MP David Steel’s Private Member’s Bill, despite its eugenics influences and despite abortion not being an issue with voters. Abortion would continue to be regarded as a matter of conscience for MPs, but as seen regarding religion and abortion, Steel’s Bill received generous assistance from Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins.

Without such support, Steel’s Bill, like its predecessors, would most likely have foundered, and Jenkins, a self-declared progressive, saw little evidence of public support;31 indeed, he later doubted whether abortion would have been legalised at all had the decision been left to “the populace”. Jenkins was among those who opposed a referendum on membership of the Common Market (later the European Union) lest the same approach be taken to abortion and his other “reforms”.32 He also steered to success Private Members’ Bills on divorce, homosexuality, the death penalty and obscenity, all of which were hailed as progressive measures;33 some have seen them as accelerating the degeneration of society,34 but according to the Darwinistic view, this revolution in morals was really evolution — it was “bound to happen”.

Critics are warned that they cannot “put back the clock”, but G K Chesterton disagreed;35 moreover, attempts to put the clock forward generally end in disaster. And Jenkins’ “reforms”, as well as realising the utopian dreams of left-liberal progressives, fulfilled the agenda of the eugenics population control movement and the Marxist social revolution. Jenkins tried to give the impression of responding to a grassroots campaign, but far from a popular initiative, these measures represented a top-down social revolution from an alliance of the “progressive” governing classes and small groups of humanist and leftist activists. Post-Steel, efforts by individual MPs to restrict abortion proved unsuccessful — but in 1990, Conservative Health Secretary Kenneth Clarke’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act,36 as well as permitting human embryo experimentation, removed the time limit for eugenics abortions, allowing them to be carried out up to birth.

In contrast, several Private Member’s Bills to restrict abortion — the first introduced by a Labour MP — were unsuccessful; the feminist abortion lobby, far from leading the campaign for legalisation, only arose in response to such attempts — but also, ironically, as a response to the sexual revolution. As will be seen in a future article, as “old-fashioned” chivalry gave way to male misogyny, casual sex was treated as the norm, and pornography encouraged men to treat women not as goddesses to be wooed and won but as disposable sex slaves. “Hell has no fury like a woman scorned’,37 and although some feminists protested these developments, others, especially on the far left, demanded abortion as a prerequisite for sexual equality.

This series will continue next month with “The politics of abortion (2).”

Notes

  1. See: Nicholson, V, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 (London: Penguin, 2003). ↩︎
  2. See: Thompson, E P, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press, 1977); The making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, Middx: Pelican Books, 1984). ↩︎
  3. Blacker feared that the Catholic local secretary “might write a strong letter to the Secretary which the latter would be bound to bring up before her Executive Committee or Council” (Letter, C P Blacker to Janet Chance, October 7, 1935 (Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C65)). ↩︎
  4. Letter, Eugenics Society to McCardie, November 22, 1932 (Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C125). ↩︎
  5. Letter, Janet Chance to C P Blacker, April 18, 1936 (Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C65). ↩︎
  6. Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/D1. ↩︎
  7. She wrote, “I was so delighted at his choice of subject — we cannot touch the subject of Human Breeding – it is not ripe for the science of induction, and yet I realise it is the most important of all questions, the breeding of the right sort of man” (see: Blacker, C. P., Eugenics: Galton and After (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1952), p. 64; p. 79; p. 79). She also warned American feminists that if they went too far they would end up in a coloured state, fringed by Irish Catholics and run by Jews (McLaren, A., Birth Control in Nineteenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 190). The Webbs sent a message of support to ALRA’s 1936 Conference (Jenkins, A., Law for the Rich (London: Charles Skilton Ltd., 1964), p. 50). ↩︎
  8. Sydney Webb, letter to The Times, October 16, 1906, in McLaren, A., Birth Control in Nineteenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 188. The LSE played an important role in the development of population studies (Langford, C., ‘The Eugenics Society and the Development of Demography in Britain: The International Population Union, The British Population Society and The Population Investigation Committee’, in Peel, R. A. (Ed.), Essays in the History of Eugenics: Proceedings of a Conference organised by the Galton Institute (London: Galton Institute, 1998), pp. 81-111). ↩︎
  9. Wells, H G, Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), p. 314, in McLaren, A., Birth Control in Nineteenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 192. ↩︎
  10. Russell, B, “Marriage and the Population Question”, International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 26, No. 4, July 1916, in Greer, G., Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (London: Picador, 1984), p. 267. ↩︎
  11. Russell, D, The Tamarisk Tree: Vol.I My Quest for Liberty and Love (London: Virago, 1977, p. 36; p. 43. ↩︎
  12. The New Generation, January 1937. ↩︎
  13. Russell, D, Hypatia or Woman and Knowledge (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1925), pp. 24-25; Jeffreys, S., The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985), p 158. ↩︎
  14. She and Haire evaded press attention by “leaping in and out of cars amid much giggling” (Russell, D., The Tamarisk Tree: Vol.I My Quest for Liberty and Love (London: Virago, 1977), pp. 219–220). The six years’ old film was a censored German edition introduced by Dr Marthe Ruben Wolff which omitted anything that might be construed as positive about Russian abortion law, focusing instead on the dangers of illegal abortion; however, it showed a Russian abortion “without narcosis” (Sexual Reform Congress (London: World League for Sexual Reform, 1929), pp. 238–239). ↩︎
  15. “[I] think a distaste for the slavery, waste and inefficiency of even ideal family life is more common among modern women than we care to admit” (Russell, D, Letter to Daily Herald, October 8, 1928). ↩︎
  16. The New Generation, November 1922. See: Malthus, ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ (1798). Since a thriving population was seen as necessary for national security, Neo-Malthusians saw a declining population as necessary to prevent war. ↩︎
  17. Russell, B, Marriage and Morals (London: Unwin, 1929/1976), p. 167. ↩︎
  18. Scofield, M., Promiscuity (Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1976), p. 33. ↩︎
  19. See: Ingrams, R, Muggeridge: The Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1995). ↩︎
  20. Russell, D, The Tamarisk Tree: Vol.I My Quest for Liberty and Love (London: Virago, 1977), pp. 238-239. ↩︎
  21. Russell, D, In Defence of Children (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1932), p. 81. ↩︎
  22. ALRA AGM, October 26, 1955 (Eugenics Society File: SA/ALR). ↩︎
  23. Leathard, A, The Fight for Family Planning (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 55. ↩︎
  24. “[N]ature, left to itself, will produce far too many children, more children than an ordinary mother nowadays will bear” (Dorothy Thurtle, remark during Stella Browne’s evidence to Birkett Enquiry, November 17, 1937 (Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry) (MH71-23, AC Paper 51)). ↩︎
  25. Leathard, A, The Fight for Family Planning (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 55. ↩︎
  26. Mazumdar, P M H, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, its Sources and its Critics in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 210. ↩︎
  27. Kevles, D J, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 86-87. ↩︎
  28. Letter, C P Blacker to Frida Laski, January 15, 1953. On January 30, 1953, Blacker writes: “Excellent! I will pursue the matter”; on March 26, 1953, he informs Laski of her election as Fellow of the Eugenics Society (Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C203). ↩︎
  29. Diggory, P, Potts, M, Peel, J, Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 253. Potts, who supported the Silkin abortion Bill (letter, The Times, January 27, 1966) authored works on contraception and abortion and was active in the Steel campaign, the population movement (See: Draper (1965); Greer (1984); Kasun (1988)) and family planning (See: Leathard, A, The Fight for Family Planning (London: Macmillan, 1980)). On the steering committee of contraceptive clinical trials (ALRA Minutes, January 12, 1967 (Eugenics Society File: SA/ALR)), Potts was a member of the Eugenics Society Council (Eugenics Review, March 1968) and Editorial Advisor to the Galton Institute’s Journal of Biosocial Science in 1993 and 1997 (noted from literature). Potts was on the Executive Committee of ALRA 1969-70 (ALRA Annual Report, in Schreiber, B. (tr. H. R. Martindale), The Men Behind Hitler: A German warning to the world (Stuttgart, 1972), p. 136) and was involved in abortion provision, sitting on the Board of the Pregnancy Advisory Service (Trades Union Congress Library: TU1). ↩︎
  30. Jenkins stressed the deliberate destruction of the foetus rather than natural pregnancy loss as the primary meaning of the word: “Abortion is the medical term used for the termination of pregnancy before the foetus or embryo is viable. To make the subject seem more difficult than it actually is, the word abortion has two other meanings: the failure of a project or action, and a dwarf or misshapen creature” (Jenkins, A, Law for the Rich (London: Charles Skilton Ltd., 1964), p. 30). ↩︎
  31. ALRA Minutes, October 7, 1965 (Eugenics Society File: SA/ALR). ↩︎
  32. The referendum, the first in British history, was justified because Britain had been taken into the Common Market without specific electoral sanction, despite constitutional issues being involved (Adams, J, Tony Benn: A biography (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 331). Although abortion legislation did not involve such issues, it has never featured in the electoral programmes of any main political party. ↩︎
  33. Jenkins also introduced a positive measure, the Race Relations Act (1965) which banned discrimination on the “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins” in British public places (See: Campbell, J, Roy Jenkins: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983). ↩︎
  34. See: Hitchens, P, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Theresa May (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). ↩︎
  35. “[W]hat man has done man can undo. In the same way human society however complex it may be, and however inevitable it may be, is still a construction of human ingenuity; and what man has done man can undo. We can put the social clock back if we like. Doubtless it would be a great nuisance; and to smash it altogether doubtless would be a horrible sacrifice; doubtless it would be a task that staggers the imagination but all this does not mean that we cannot do it if we like; all this is only a way of saying that we don’t like. There is nothing physical or inevitable to prevent men from going back to any previous condition whatever” (G. K. Chesterton, “What’s Wrong With the World?” (1910), quoted in Dale Ahlquist, American Chesterton Society Lecture 115, ‘Anticipation’). ↩︎
  36. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/37/contents ↩︎
  37. “‘”Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d’ (William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697), Act III, Scene 2. ↩︎

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