Voice of the Family

A LAY INITIATIVE FORMED TO DEFEND

CATHOLIC TEACHING ON THE FAMILY

The Politics of Abortion (3)

By Ann Farmer   |   17 September 2025

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

History shows the negative effects on society of mass abortion, which in Soviet Russia caused declining birth rates and social disorder. By the 1930s, Stalin called a halt to the anti-family experiment favoured by Karl Marx and his patron Friedrich Engels, because of the disastrous effects on the birth rate and on society1 as mothers were forced to work outside the home while the state raised their children.2 In Communist Russia, free abortion was introduced in 1920 and, like other countries that followed suit, in the absence of pre-natal tests, eugenics abortions were based mainly on negative views about the mother.3 Female British abortion advocates were aware of this; some actually visited the Soviet Union to study the Communist model, which was enthusiastically embraced by radical feminists Naomi Mitchison, Dora Russell, Joan Malleson and Stella Browne. This was despite the horrifying realities of the Russian conveyor-belt system, which some witnessed first-hand: abortions were carried out without anaesthesia, with aborted fetuses displayed in jars as a ghastly deterrent. Eventually, fears about women’s health from repeat abortion led to restrictions,4 although when the abortion law was rescinded in 1936, they excluded abortions to save the mother’s life — and eugenics abortions.5

But if British campaigners were interested in Soviet law, the Soviet Commissioner for Social Welfare, Alexandra Kollontai, who introduced abortion on demand, took an interest in the British campaign: she read the Neo-Malthusian periodical New Generation and visited their Walworth Clinic in London. Kollontai, a sexual radical who believed that men broke strikes because of family commitments, inspired Stella Browne’s view that even romantic love was an obstacle to the Revolution.6

Another big obstacle to the Revolution was the indifference of “the masses”, but in the 1960s, “the masses” came under pressure from another kind of revolution, thanks to “reforms” championed by a coalition of left and right — of Communists and capitalists, humanist eugenicists and Neo-Malthusians. Coinciding with Margaret Sanger’s development of the Pill, the catalyst that sparked the Sexual Revolution was the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising — followed in 1968 by the Czechoslovakian revolt — as Western Marxists, aided by violent student protests, turned to undermining society’s foundations.

And yet abortion was still not an issue in the 1960s British Labour Party; even in the 1970s, far-left groups campaigning on economic issues appeared uninterested in female equality. However, Communist revolutionary Tariq Ali insisted on the importance of the women’s movement,7 expressing gratitude to a number of “militants of the Spartacus League and the International Marxist Group (the British section of the Fourth International)”, including Leonora Lloyd of the National Abortion Campaign.8 But while echoing Engels’ argument that “the institution of the family” exploited wives and serviced capitalism by providing cheap labour, Ali admitted that “one can in no way talk in terms of a mass movement of working class women.” According to Ali, the new revolutionary approach was to infiltrate left-wing parties and trades unions and seize upon grassroots discontent to promote the Revolution; this included feminist and student bodies, black workers and Northern Irish Nationalism.9 In order to conquer “the commanding heights of the economy”, the far left aimed to seize the commanding heights of the culture.

Leonora Lloyd was closely involved in the genesis of the National Abortion Campaign — but so was ALRA, and in 2003 the two organisations merged to form Abortion Rights. ALRA was politically conservative, but Lloyd had a long history of involvement in Marxist politics.10 Middle-class and university educated, the New left was more interested in culture than in defending industrial toilers, although happy to stir industrial action when they thought could bring down capitalism.11 According to Labour MP Edwin Brooks, “disillusioned left-wingers (post Hungary)” were “seeking a new identity: a new ethos integrating humanism and socialism. They shifted from the confusions of hard-core traditional issues (such as public ownership) into the retreat of furthering the ‘easier’ social causes like family planning”. But Brooks, who issued warnings about non-white immigration,12 was part of this tendency, introducing the Family Planning Act (1967) and, like abortion legislator David Steel, received crucial assistance from libertarian Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. Brooks’ step-by-step approach aimed at the introduction of state-provided birth control, allowing local health authorities to provide contraception for “social” as well as “medical” reasons.13

His initiative enabled a Labour government to introduce population control at arm’s length, for allegedly compassionate reasons; a similar move by a Conservative administration would have been much more controversial, prompting accusations of the rich trying to eradicate the poor. But following Labour’s lead, the next Conservative government went even further, taking birth control to the “masses”, using sex education to further population control.14 This “miseducation” was taken to younger and younger children on a plea of preventing youthful pregnancies, and although it actually increased the numbers, the assertion that children should not have children was difficult to criticise. The sexualisation of children functioned as population control; ironically, while the left saw providing the poor with “free” birth control, including abortion, as a means of furthering “the revolution”, the right saw it as a means of heading off revolution by reducing the numbers of the poor. 

Meanwhile, the ruthless suppression of popular uprisings in Soviet “buffer states” — Hungary and Czechoslovakia — was plain to see; there must be no revolution against the Revolution; however, unlike in the 1920s and 30s, when left-wing intellectuals took the “Soviet road” and painted a glowing portrait of a “Fabian fairyland”,15 thanks to television, ordinary Westerners could now see Soviet tanks rolling over the green shoots of democracy. Suddenly, Communism was a far less attractive political option, and whereas Western capitalism had delivered a measure of prosperity to “the masses”, now it was Communism that had to promise “jam tomorrow”.16

Western Marxists began to build upon the work of the Frankfurt School: founded in Germany in 1923 and exiled to New York under Hitler, leading “Frankfurt” philosophers Theodor W Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer advocated a “long march through the institutions” — spearheaded not by “the masses” but by middle-class intellectuals. Adorno, Marcuse and the other “Frankfurt exiles” pondered why, despite Marx’s predictions, capitalism endured; they concluded that “mass culture had rotted the will of the proletariat. Alienated from their society, their minds blown by advertising, media manipulation and soap operas, the masses had become incapable of revolutionary action. Intellectuals must therefore initiate such action and set the pace of restructuring their own institutions”, starting in the universities by establishing “sociology and linguistic departments” where students “could better understand politics” by “analysing culture and applying the ‘correct’ ideology”.17

The Frankfurt School almost found a home at the London School of Economics, thanks to the architect of the British Welfare State, Liberal politician William Beveridge.18 As seen, the LSE’s founding members included Beatrice and Sydney Webb, who were also members of the socialist Fabian Society, which pursued a very similar idea to the “Frankfurters”: cultural “permeation”. The aim was to promote their ideas through the civil servants trained by the LSE, and through all political parties, thus creating the appearance of consensus on economic issues.19 Key figures in the LSE and the Fabians were Harold and Frida Laski, prominent abortion advocates and eugenicist population controllers. A believer in Marxist revolution,20 Harold Laski was involved in the Labour Party21 even while “an advocate of revolutionary change”.22 Harold studied under eugenicist Sir Francis Galton’s disciple Karl Pearson, while Frida, abortion campaign pioneer, was “an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics”23 and closely involved in birth control promotion and provision; Harold also supported euthanasia.24 Having developed personal links with the Frankfurt School, he wanted to welcome it to England, and even arranged with Sydney Webb for a London office to be established for their use. When the Institute moved to America, he was invited to lecture at its New York base, Columbia University.25

The Fabians shared their right-wing opponents’ self-image as superior beings, and their sympathy for the poor took the form of “rescuing” and “managing” the lower classes on behalf of society as a whole, rather than focusing on “the dignity and worth of the individual”; under their influence, the LSE became “a stronghold of eugenics”,26 teaching it to their pupils.[Ibid, p 221.] Beveridge, LSE director from 1919 to 1937, was succeeded by Sir Alexander M Carr-Saunders, “also an officer of the Eugenics Society”.27 Evolutionist Sydney Webb described the Fabian approach as the “inevitability of gradualness”. A well-known LSE alumnus is financier George Soros, who has heavily “invested” in population control,28 but the Frankfurt approach did not fully emerge until the 1960s, when a “new generation of marxist students appeared”, upon which liberal thinkers, and “those who had renounced the marxism of their youth…rubbed their eyes” in disbelief as the “heresies of marxism” began to appear “in brand new spring clothes”.29

Although Karl Marx saw undermining the traditional family as the key to ushering in a Communist Utopia, as seen, this approach was not tried on a wide scale until the Russian Revolution. It proved disastrous for Sovietism, but after the disruption of the Second World War and its aftermath,30 it was Hungary that proved the watershed for Western Marxism, as its followers began to distract public attention from the evils of Communism by relentlessly criticising the “crimes” of capitalism. 

They also stirred its discontents, and as part of this political process, abortion, which the left had seen as a tragic outcome of capitalistic oppression, was transformed into a “right” to be demanded in the cause of equality. Significantly, during the 1960s, ALRA, the tiny, ageing abortion campaign, was “taken over” by youthful left-wingers in a Marxist-style coup. Using tactics promoted by American Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky, this influx gave the impression of popular support for legalisation, as campaigners used capitalist marketing techniques, including opinion polls, to manufacture the appearance of widespread support.31 In the 1970s, the fledgling feminist movement — itself a by-product of the Sexual Revolution, expressing female rage at male chauvinism and sexual exploitation — was taken over by leftist feminists who excluded dissent; and as seen, a similar transformation occurred in political parties. 

Thus did abortion, which emerged from the eugenics population control movement, become a banner issue of cultural Marxists and the feminists under their influence. The left now sees abortion as just as fundamental to modern democracy as votes for women; ironically, they stigmatise the pro-life movement as “right wing”, even though pro-lifers defend the lives of all the unborn, whatever their background. Abortion was and remains a weapon used to curb the numbers of the poor, the disabled, ethnic minorities and females — all groups championed by the left. Essentially anti-democratic, it not only abrogates the human right to life of the unborn but in so doing destroys future generations of voters — and it is no coincidence that the eugenics population control movement arose with the rise of the modern democratic age. 

And yet, despite the censorship of the media and the demonisation of the pro-life movement, the public still do not want “abortion on demand”.32 Meanwhile, disquiet about the suppression of free speech, which began with suppressing the truth of abortion, is growing. If pro-lifers can highlight the reality of abortion, its origins in prejudice and its political and social ramifications, public distaste for abortion could be transformed into political opposition.

Notes

  1. Engels saw the traditional family as a human construct that benefited capitalism by exploiting women’s free labour, insisting it must be broken up to enable a “return” to the free matriarchal society he believed had existed much earlier; Engels was influenced by the work of Johann Jacov Bachoven’s 1861 Das Mutterrecht — (“The Mother-Right” — (1861), which posited that early humans lived in matriarchal societies, theories long since disproved, although resurrected by 1970s feminism (M. Phillips, The Sex-change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male (The Social Market Foundation, London, 1999), p. 204). ↩︎
  2. Engels “stated that the liberation of women demanded ‘as its main precondition…the reintegration of the whole female sex into the public industrial sector”’ (F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (17th ed., Stuttgart, 1919), p. 62; p. 64, quoted in C. R. Ferreira, ‘The Destructive Forces behind Religious Feminism’, C. M. Kelly (Ed.), Feminism v. Mankind (Family Publications, Milton Keynes, Bucks, 1990), p. 58). ↩︎
  3. By the 1930s eugenics abortion had been legalised in Catalonia (Spain), Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Roumania, Sweden and Vaud (Switzerland) (Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Report), Ministry of Health and Home Office (His Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1939), pp. 158–165). ↩︎
  4. In 1930 the abortion-supporting American obstetrics professor F J Taussig, who claimed Hitler’s 1933 Nuremberg race law “established that abortion under genuine medical indications is not subject to punishment when demanded and performed by legally qualified physicians” and presented it as a model for changing American abortion law (Abortion Spontaneous and Induced: Medical and Social Aspects, p. 424, in Brennan, W., The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution (Landmark Press, St. Louis, 1983), pp. 30–31), reported on the horrors of the public “abortaria” in Moscow, where 57 abortions were performed in one morning with no anaesthesia or sedatives. Initially abortions had been free, but so great was the demand that efforts were made to curb them by displaying fetuses in jars, in different stages of development; the law was tightened up because of fears for women’s health from repeat abortions, and eventually rescinded because of the effects on population. Taussig maintained that anyone who had not visited a Russian “abortarium” could not fully appreciate its gruesomeness (Quoted by Louise McIlroy to Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry) (MH71-23, AC Paper 35)). Clearly Taussig did not reckon with English abortion advocates: Dora Russell regarded the Russian abortion system as exemplary, and tried to publicise it, while English abortion campaigners who made such visits included Dr Joan Malleson, who visited Russia to study abortion (ALRA, evidence to Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion [Birkett Enquiry] [MH71-23, AC Paper 25]), and political radical Naomi Mitchison, whose biographer revealed that in 1932 Mitchison was “interested in birth control practices and in particular what seemed to be an enlightened attitude to abortion”, while adding erroneously that the “Soviet Union was the only country in the world where it was legal” (Calder, J., The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison (Virago Press, London, 1997), p 111). Malleson continued to promote legal abortion, while according to her biographer, Mitchison described “in cool yet excruciating detail” an abortion performed on a woman “clearly in acute pain” in a Moscow abortarium which performed 20,000 a year without anaesthesia, but “made no comment” (Jenni Calder, ‘A woman in a hundred’, Guardian Weekend, July 26, 1997). ↩︎
  5. This suggests that eugenic abortion was not merely incidental to such provision (‘Decision of the Central Executive Committee and Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR’, Moscow News, July 8, 1936). ↩︎
  6. Rowbotham, S., A New World for Women: Stella Browne – Socialist Feminist (Pluto Press, London, 1977), p. 18; p. 47). Kollontai, who influenced British and American sexual reformers, viewed the ‘passing of the family’ without regret: “In truth, it is welcomed” (Blacker, C. P., Eugenics: Galton and After [Gerald Duckworth, London 1952], p. 137). In Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle Kollontai claimed that workers ‘regulated childbirth’ by infanticide and prostitution (Kollontai, A., Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle (Socialist Workers Party (Britain) and the International Socialist Organisation (USA)/ Bookmark Publications, London, 1919/1984). ↩︎
  7. Ali, T., The Coming British Revolution (Jonathan Cape, London 1972), pp 225–227. ↩︎
  8. Ibid, p 9. ↩︎
  9. Ibid, p 226. ↩︎
  10. An obituary on the website Revolutionary History recalled Lloyd’s involvement in the South African resistance movement against apartheid, during which she was arrested, remarking: “She joined the International Marxist Group in the late 1960’s and left in the early 1980’s. She remained a committed socialist all her life. … But for many, it is for her contribution to the struggle for women’s liberation in Britain that Leonora will be most remembered”, particularly “the central role she played in the creation and sustaining of the National Abortion Campaign, which was founded in 1975. … In all of this and more Leonora was so often at the centre. She spoke at countless meetings, in particular understanding the importance of winning support from the trade unions for a woman’s right to choose. The huge demonstrations that NAC organised in opposition to each successive attempt to restrict our rights would not have been possible without the huge support generated amongst the ranks of trade union women. She was everywhere, inspiring others with her conviction that without control over our bodies, women would never have control over our lives. She was particularly proud of the Schools Kit that she developed for NAC — it was vital to her that younger women should not suffer the return to the backstreets that women who had grown up before the 1967 Act had lived through — at the cost of so many lives” (Terry Conway [described as “one of the editors of International Viewpoint and a leading member of Socialist Resistance, British Section of the Fourth International”, Obituaries, Leonora Lloyd (1940–2002). Interestingly, in view of Lloyd’s left-wing stance, ALRA nursed the fledgling National Abortion Campaign by carrying out administrative work and giving advice, and the Labour Abortion Rights Campaign emerged from NAC. ALRA was also responsible for Christians for a Free Choice in 1976 and Tories for Free Choice in 1977 (noted from literature). The origin of these groups underlined the absence of a widespread spontaneous campaign. ↩︎
  11. Shipley, Peter, Revolutionaries in Modern Britain (The Bodley Head, London, 1976), p 19. ↩︎
  12. Brooks later wrote: “[A]n unrestrained influx of coloured immigrants would have been politically catastrophic” (Brooks, E., This Crowded Kingdom (Chas. Knight & Co. Ltd., London, 1973), p. 129. ↩︎
  13. Leathard, A., The Fight for Family Planning (Macmillan, London, 1980), pp. 134–136). ↩︎
  14. Conservative Health Secretary Sir Keith Joseph gave the Family Planning Association £40,000 in 1972–3 for training health visitors to give courses in sex education and personal relationships to teachers and health educators (Ibid, p 153); he supported “family planning” even more energetically than his Labour predecessor Richard Crossman, especially favouring the domiciliary/community approach (Ibid, p. 158). ↩︎
  15. The Webbs became Shaw’s “pre-eminent converts”, presenting a more positive picture; they took the “Soviet road” along with a swathe of intellectuals to what Beatrice’s nephew Malcolm Muggeridge called ‘“Fabian Fairyland”’; however, Shaw said he was fighting a hostile press: if he said nine positive things and one negative, the press would concentrate on the negative — so he said ten positive things (M. Holroyd, Bernard Shaw Vol. III, 1918-1950: The Lure of Fantasy (Penguin, London, 1993), pp. 251-253). ↩︎
  16. Giddens, A., The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Polity Press, 1999, Cambridge), pp 4–5. ↩︎
  17. Annan, N., Our Age: The Generation that Made Post-War Britain (HarperCollins, 1990/1991, London), p. 353. ↩︎
  18. Ibid, p 7. ↩︎
  19. Ibid, pp 3–4; much later, however, the “young lecturers and teachers at LSE” who “taught the last cohort of my generation which included A H Halsey, Duncan Mitchell, David Lockwood and, from Gemany, Ralf Dahrendorf” were from more humble backgrounds, and “were sickened by the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet invasion of Hungary” as well as the Suez adventure (Ibid, p 347). ↩︎
  20. Laski was “confident” in believing “that he could reconcile parliamentary democracy with marxism” (Annan, N., Our Age: The Generation that Made Post-War Britain (HarperCollins, London, 1990/1991), p 7). ↩︎
  21. As Chair of the National Executive Committee, Laski caused controversy in the Labour Party, scheming to replace Clement Attlee with either Ernest Bevin or Hugh Dalton (Pugh, M., Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (Vintage Books, London, 2011), p 266); Attlee exercised restraint (Ibid, p. 277), but Laski succeeded in “eventually provoking another memorably restrained dismissal from Attlee: ‘A period of silence on your part would be welcome”’ (Ibid, pp 281–2). ↩︎
  22. Annan, N., Our Age: The Generation that Made Post-War Britain (HarperCollins, London 1990/1991), p 246. ↩︎
  23. See: Pugh, M., Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (Vintage Books, London, 2011); Michael Newman, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ↩︎
  24. Kemp, N D A, ‘Merciful Release’: The history of the British euthanasia movement (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002), pp 88–89. ↩︎
  25. Laski returned to England in 1920 to teaching government at the LSE and in 1926 was made professor of political science. An executive member of the Fabian Society (1922–1936), in 1936 Laski, a prolific writer, along with Victor Gollancz and John Strachey, co-founded the Left Book Club. Although a Zionist, Laski rejected his Jewish religion and in 1946, in a radio address, controversially attacked the Catholic Church as an opponent of democracy with which it was ‘“impossible to make peace”’, describing it as ‘“one of the permanent enemies of all that is decent in the human spirit”’ (See: Pugh, M., Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party [Vintage Books, London, 2011]; Michael Newman, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). ↩︎
  26. Cavanaugh-O’Keefe, J, Roots of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of Eugenics (2000), p 40. ↩︎
  27. Carr-Saunders was in post until 1956 (Cavanaugh-O’Keefe, J., Roots of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of Eugenics (2000), pp 38–39). ↩︎
  28. Cavanaugh-O’Keefe, J., Roots of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of Eugenics (2000), p. 148. LSE alumni have distinguished themselves in politics and economics, the arts and media, and in academia, including British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Lee Kwan Yew, Kim Campbell, George Papandreou and Michael Manley; also the first President of modern Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta; social scientists Karl Popper and Anthony Giddens; billionaires George Soros and David Rockefeller. See: Geoffrey R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A study in British politics and political thought 1899-1914 (University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA, 1971). ↩︎
  29. Annan, N., Our Age: The Generation that Made Post-War Britain (HarperCollins, London, 1990/1991), p 354. ↩︎
  30. Margaret Hickey, ‘A deep dive into wokism: Examining the Marxist underpinnings of woke ideology’, review, Noelle Mering, Awake Not Woke (Tan Books, 2021). ↩︎
  31. See: Alinsky, S., Reveille for Radicals (Vintage Books, New York, 1946/1989). ↩︎
  32. Christian Hacking, “Is the public simply pro-choice? Public opinion is more nuanced than you might think”, The Critic, May 12, 2023. ↩︎

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