Update on Ted Atkinson - see post of 12th December 2010

The great Catholic activist and our friend, Ted Atkinson from Norfolk is in back in court again in Kings Lynn on 3rd March for his commital hearing. He has a Catholic solicitor and barrister in his legal team.

Please remember him and his fight for the unborn in your prayers..

Marie Stopes – Liberator of women, or racially motivated eugenicist? III

It is very interesting to see how a humanist religious language is substituted for true religion, and eugenics (as Robert Hugh Benson well saw in Lord of the World) eulogized as nothing less than a ‘sacred’ duty: ‘Parenthood, with the divine gift of love in its power, with the glorious potentialities of handing on a radiant, wholesome, beautiful youth should be a sacred and preserved gift, a privilege only to be exercised by those who rationally comprehend the counter-balancing duties.’ (212). Likewise, ‘It is the duty of a seer to embody his message in such a form that its beauty is apparent and the vision can be seen by all the people.’ (219)

It is clear in reading you these few quotations that there is a certain kind of terminology or language employed that is less familiar now, or at least far less common. Thus instead of talking of humanity she talks of ‘race’, and instead of populations she talks of human ‘stocks’. There is no accident here, however, or careless use. Stopes was a decided racist, and anti-semite. She was also an ardent supporter and, as one might now say, fan of Adolf Hitler. As late as August 1939, just one month before we were at war with Germany, Stopes was writing to Hitler with these words: ‘Dear Herr Hitler, Love is the greatest thing in the world: so will you accept from me these (poems) that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?’[1] Havelock Ellis among many others noted her anti-semitism, and she also drew critical fire for attending the Nazi-sponsored International Congress for Population Science in Berlin in 1935.

But Stopes also practised what she preached. She once again became notorious when she cut her own son, the Humanist ‘philosopher’ Harry Stopes-Roe, out of her will, because he insisted on marrying Mary Eyre Wallis, later Mary Stopes-Roe, who was myopic. Stopes reasoned that her grandchildren might inherit the condition. One of the comments left on the Telegraph website subsequent to Gerald Warner’s critique of the stamp bearing Stope’s portrait suggested that it was quite wrong to call Stopes ‘anti-life’; after all, ‘she wanted every child a wanted, loved and cared-for child’. A brilliantly acid rejoinder to this comment puts it thus: ‘which translated means “Stopes was very much anti-life. She wanted every unwanted child a dead child."’ Even her own grandchildren!

Possibly still the best and most far-reaching criticism that has been made to date of the whole basis of eugenics, and with it birth-control, is that of G. K. Chesterton, in his 1922 work Eugenics and Other Evils. I mention this work not only because I happen to find Chesterton’s critique so congenial, but still more because Stopes seems so concretely to encapsulate the objects of that critique. Chesterton was, of course, ridiculed at the time by Shaw and so many other fashionable intellectuals, but his analysis has, I think, stood the test of time, and one might even say that it appears to be quite prescient about our current post-eugenic environment. It is not the occasion to rehearse the whole of Chesterton’s argument here, but there are nevertheless a couple of points that could be made to show how the general trend of his argument relates to Stopes.

Chesterton’s book[2] is divided into two sections, the first of which deals with the utter impracticality of this ‘false theory’. Chesterton sought to demonstrate the absurdity of the eugenic position, firstly on the grounds that it is a pseudoscience that is not in a position to demonstrate the beneficial nature of its practices, and secondly (and perhaps more importantly), because there is no authority, other than sheer tyranny, that could make decisions on such intimately private and human activity. We have already seen how Stopes’s arguments for eugenics rely on false analogies with agricultural practice, to the degree even of likening a woman to a strip of land. Perhaps more pernicious still is her supreme confidence that she has just the scientific expertise and authority to decide who should marry, to whom, and how many, if any, children, they should be allowed. One can see in this simple plea for power the whole system of servitude that Belloc so ably characterised, rearing its ugly head once more. Like many another utopian, Stopes fantasises entirely on the condition that she is the boss, and no-one else. Of course, Chesterton notes, the problem with experts is that they all disagree with each other (one might add that they also have an unnerving habit of changing their minds on the merest whim).

The second half of the book is the more challenging, and all the darker for it. Chesterton portays with biting accuracy, the ‘real aim’ of eugenics; in fine, the enslavement of the working and poorer classes to the capitalists and their industrial economy. Having realised (whether consciously or not) that to give their workers the means to buy the tools necessary to make their own living (i.e. real productive property) would not be to their own economic advantage, the only real solution is to make them utterly dependent for a living on them alone. This necessarily involves paying a salary so low that a working man can only find the means to subsist for himself and his family. This, Chesteron explains, has necessarily meant a great increase in the impoverishment of the labouring classes with respect to the wealthy, the consequence of which has been an increase in a whole range of social ills, unrest and so the ‘revolt’ to which Stopes herself refers. Now it begins to dawn on us the abject hypocrisy of Stopes’s solution. She doesn’t suggest that a real living is offered to such working families, but rather that they be progressively sterilised so that ‘innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, and inferior’ beings might be eliminated; an economic and aesthetic ‘problem’ removed from bourgeois life. That is the savagery of her ‘care’ for women; that those reduced to abject poverty might have their one last freedom left (that of family) taken away too. This is the liberal ‘utopia’ she imagines. No great leap of imagination is required to see that the same ‘calculations’ lie behind much of our contemporary debates about population reduction, climate change, the provision of condoms and other contraceptives to the world’s poorest people.[3] What is dressed up in terms of philanthropic concern is exactly the same self-serving nihilism that Chesterton ascribed in his own day to the cynical ploys of the English capitalist classes to their own population. It is absolutely incumbent upon us to demonstrate, just as Chesterton did in his own day, the absurdity, the falsity, and the utter hypocrisy, that lies behind our own Malthusian intelligentsia.

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[1] Cited by Gerald Warner, ‘Marie Stopes is forgiven racism and eugenics because she was anti-life’, The Daily Telegraph, 28 August 2008. Warner doesn’t state what his source for this letter is.

[2] G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell and Company, 1922).

[3] This might be a place to expand this talk into a discussion of ‘overpopulation’ in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where it is exactly radical underpopulation, usually the result of civil war, endemic disease, and more distant causes such as the slave trade, that is so often the reason for poverty.

More news from the Oxford CVM

Today we put on our third soup kitchen. It’s our fourth month, but we had to cancel the one in December because no-one could get to Oxford in the bad weather. We decided to make it another mobile one because we’re still getting to know the area and the habits of our potential guests, so we set off with our supplies of tobacco, soup, sandwiches, cake and fruit.

For an hour we trudged round the centre of Oxford. There must have been something exceptional happening because we didn’t see a single homeless person. Eventually we asked a community policeman and he directed us to Speedwell Street, where the night shelter is.

Once again, we trudged off down a long street, right out of the centre towards an area of “social” housing (built of dark brown brick so that it looms over you intimidatingly).

Once we got there, we found a short cul-de-sac with the night shelter, a dark, forbidding building, forming the end of it. As we walked down we could see huddled figures sitting on the pavement, and a few standing around the entrance to the shelter as well. We met a potential guest on his way out of the street and offered him free tobacco, which he accepted. I was aware of a flurry of movement at the other end of the street, followed by a watchful stillness as the package changed hands. Some of the figures jumped up and ran away into the building and I found myself thinking, “Do they really hate do-gooders so much?” Actually they were running in to call their friends out so that they could get freebies as well. We carried on and offered free tobacco to the group huddled on the ground. Instantly an arm was waved to the remaining men by the doorway of the shelter and the cry went up: “Hup! Tobaccoooooo! Hoy!” and suddenly men were running at us from all directions. It was slightly alarming for a moment. Without meaning to be disrespectful it reminded me of when cows run towards you: They all, apparently miraculously, stop simultaneously and perfectly in line and stand there jostling  one another and looking at you curiously from about four feet away with a slightly embarrassed but benign air. That’s exactly what these poor men did. After a moment one of them coughed and said diffidently, “Er- did you say you had some tobacco?”

After that we were very busy for about half an hour doling out our goodies and chatting to them. They advised us to put posters up in the shelter and went with us eagerly to the door to make sure that we did.

They were quite a cross-section. There were people suffering from mental illness, one obviously suffering from the effects of a bad trip, one or two standing or sitting completely enveloped in their own misery, one who held forth on politics very coherently and clearly wanted to get out of his situation, and another who is just about to get his own accommodation and funding for a course who was quite elated. A few didn’t want to speak at first but came up later and some just wanted to be left alone.

Altogether we gave out food or tobacco to more than 15 people. We talked to more than that and we made the acquaintance of three or four in particular. We have taken our first mobile phone number, to help someone move into his flat. Apparently he has absolutely nothing to put in it; we are going to investigate what is available to him from Social Services or other sources and to try help him with other things. Watch this space for requests for household items.

Every month we say that we might be able to hold a meal in the cafe and every month we don’t, but we are going to try to next month, if we can get our publicity sorted.

For lay people who work in our various jobs in the world, one of the most striking things about the people we spoke to is that their conversation is genuine and adult in the sense that it is all about real things that actually matter, which is a breath of fresh air to some of us!

Once again, it was a very satisfying and quite enlightening experience. We are looking forward to carrying out our first “spin-off” – helping our new friend with his new start

God bless our Irish pro lifer friends

Dublin suicide ‘workshop’ a bust with twice as many protesters as attendees

by Hilary White

DUBLIN, February 17, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – “Dr. Death” Philip Nitschke’s controversial visit to Ireland proved to be anti-climactic after only a handful of people turned out for his Dublin suicide workshop, over half of whom were journalists. The Australian Dr. Nitschke, one of the world’s most enthusiastic proponents of legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide, had attempted to vet attendees of the lecture, but had so few takers that he eventually decided to open the venue to anyone.
Even so, said Niamh Uí Bhriain of the Dublin-based Life Institute, only 20 people attended, 12 of whom were with the press. During the lecture, over 50 people demonstrated outside, carrying signs reading “Suicide ‘workshop’ illegal and sick,” and “Lock up your grannies, Dr. Death is here.”
Uí Bhriain told LSN that the numbers are a clear indication that Dr. Nitschke’s suicide workshop is not welcome in Ireland. Prior to the event she had written to Dublin’s Garda (police) Commissioner saying that the workshop contravened Ireland’s criminal code prohibition against counseling suicide, and asking that it be shut down.
Typically, Nitschke’s suicide workshops include information on how to commit suicide, for which he recommends the drug Nembutal. He has admitted that his organization, Exit International, has given information on how to obtain the drug from Mexico even to young people who have stated their intention to commit suicide. Nitschke is the inventor of the “exit bag,” a plastic bag that he says can be fitted over a person’s head to suffocate them after taking the drugs.
In her letter to the Gardai, Uí Bhriain said, “Clearly Dr Nitschke is counselling the suicide of others and his actions are in breach of the Act. This law was written to protect vulnerable people and, should the Gardai not enforce the law, this workshop will most likely result in the death of an Irish citizen at some stage in the future.”
Uí Bhriain said she was disappointed by the lack of response from the Garda Commissioner, saying it was a “disgrace.” “The Commissioner got hundreds of calls and all his office would say was ‘why are you calling us?’” she told LSN.
“Their official line was that they are monitoring things.”
The demonstration, which was supported by the Life Institute, was organized by Maria Mhic Meanmain whose elderly parents both died following debilitating illnesses. Mhic Meanmain said that Nitschke was “normalizing suicide, and bringing about a situation where elderly and sick people would feel they had a duty to die.”
“It makes me feel incredibly sad that people like Philip Nitschke are offering suicide as a solution to anything,” she said. “I lost both my parents to serious, debilitating illnesses. I know that palliative care, family support and love are what help at the end of life - not making elderly and sick people feel as if they are a burden.”
Mhic Meanmain added that if Nitschke succeeded in normalizing suicide, it would not be long before what was being now sold as a choice became an obligation: “This will lead to situations where elderly and terminally ill people are told that they are wasting resources and should stop being a burden to society.”
Niamh Uí Bhriain told LSN that Nitschke would be “responsible for the deaths of vulnerable people - both young and old - who were listening to his promotion of suicide.”
“We’re losing more than 600 people a year due to suicide, and every case is a tragedy which leaves families devastated,” she said. “Nitschke’s reckless and dangerous promotion of suicide will lead directly to the death of people in this country.”

Marie Stopes – Liberator of women, or racially motivated eugenicist? II

What might such burdens be? Stopes immediately makes an analogy between human and animal, and even plant, populations, based on the ‘fact’ that humans are in essence ‘biological units in their bodily sense’ (209). While, she says, there has been a tendency for a reduction in offspring among most species, too many are still born in each generation for all to be sustainable. Hence, the weak must die. This is an old canard, and is undisguisedly borrowed here from the theories of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) that ‘clearest-headed and blackest-hearted’ inheritor of the intellectual tradition of the French philosophes (and hence Freemasonry). On the following page Stopes provides an analogy for her theory: the cultivation of Shirley poppies. The basic idea is that when too many poppies occupy the same strip of soil they deteriorate in quality, and yet continue to reproduce themselves. Stopes imagines an experiment in which two identical plots are planted with the poppies; one with a dozen plants, the other with a hundred. In all likelihood, she says, the strip with a hundred plants will produce more stunted and unhealthy specimens than that with only a dozen. She emphasizes, however, that despite their inferior state, they would still succeed in reproducing themselves, That the analogy with deprived urban populations is entirely inapt need not be argued closely here; yet the implications are devastating for Stopes’s stated desire for planned human population growth. It is interesting that Stopes ends her little fable with the possibility that an entirely new species would come to eliminate the weaker population of poppies. In other words her analogy depends on nothing more than the most naked metaphors for social Darwinism.

The two causes that Stopes identifies for the ‘degeneracy’ of contemporary populations (or racial stocks as she would say) are: sexually transmitted diseases, and overcrowding. Stopes considered disease to be the most immediate cause of society’s weakness, but the more difficult and more fundamental problem is, she maintained, overpopulation. And this, because while a disease is an obvious ill, the desire to procreate is entirely natural, and normally perceived as a good. Stopes again reverts to a rather unusual analogy. She speaks of the ‘overcrowding’ of a mother’s womb: ‘Little is realized by the general public of the immensity of the effects of this crowding in the womb of the ignorant and helpless woman, of the torment she endures, of the weakening of the human stock which results.’ (213) Here is another intellectual deception. She again refers to the analogy of the strip of poppies, but of course the womb itself cannot be overcrowded except, and this is what Stopes apparently means, sequentially, with one pregnancy following another. Thus ‘the soil of the mother’s body’ is likened to the depleted fertility of an over-farmed field. The analogy is made boldly, but the case is not developed, let alone proven.

Stopes, in any case, returns to her imagined utopia, the ‘ideal’, now beginning to sound not dissimilar to Huxley’s Brave New World: ‘The race pictured in the Utopias – the human race as it may be – must have not only well-developed and sufficiently beautiful and adaptable bodies, it must have a mind increasingly attuned to the ideal.’ (215). What can she have in mind? It appears that Stopes feels that ‘overcrowding’ depletes the mental resources of the species too, and that similarly, a child born into ‘the poison of bitterness provoked by the anguish and horror of undersired maternity’ will likewise be touched by the mental imbalance and depression of the mother, and so will be marked for life. But there is more. Stopes perceives an innate revolt in womanhood. She (woman), thus marked by the successive generations of bitterness, is ready for ‘revolt’. ‘The revolt (ed. read ‘revolution’), the bitterness, which is now finding expression in violence and uprising in every part of the world, is the result not only of simple crowding, but is also the echo of the revolt and bitterness and horror of women who bore the burden of age-long tradition, no longer passively, but bearing it with the consciousness that it should not have been if they had been allowed full knowledge.’ (218-219, italics in original). A more clearly expressed statement of Freemasonic belief could scarcely be imagined within the context of this essay’s subject. As with all such poisons it is couched in the most warm and glowingly human terms. Stopes declares that this reign of bitterness and revolt would be over, and the new Utopia begin, if only every child were born of a woman that really wanted him, where he would be loved, cherished, and nurtured. Of course, we all desire that, but what is the means Stopes proposes to achieve this Utopia. Listen! ‘Translated into terms of everyday practice, I maintain that the only hope for the race is the conscious elimination of all diseased and overcrowded lives before their conception, by planning only to conceive those for whom adequate provision of material necessities and a loving welcome are reasonably to be anticipated.’ (221) Stopes of course, had none of the delicacy of contemporary liberals. She declares baldly, that ‘this Utopia could be achieved in my lifetime, had I the power to issue inviolable edicts. Alas! that the age of beneficent autocracy has never been and is not here today!’ (221)

And naturally Stopes was capable of rather more radical expression of these matters. In her 1920 work Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future, she advocates nothing less than the ‘sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood [to] be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.’[1] This claim is made in the context of a much wider argument about the demographics of large cities, where, as Stopes puts it, ‘society allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the community, to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, and inferior infants’. (211) This requires the state control of parenthood for the good of the wider community. ‘The power of parenthood ought no longer to be exercised by all, however inferior, as an "individual right." It is profoundly a duty and a privilege, and it is essentially the concern of the whole community.’ (211-212) One can imagine the dulcet tones of Hilary Clinton saying such a thing.

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[1] This citation, common to a number of internet sources, is doubtful, as I have been unable to trace it in the original work: Marie C. Stopes, Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future (London: George Putnam’s Sons, 1920). Nevertheless the theme that this pseudo-quotation suggests is most certainly developed in the final chapter, XX ‘The Creation of a New and Irradiated Race’, pp. 208-228.

Marie Stopes – Liberator of women, or racially motivated eugenicist? I

Marie Stopes – Liberator of women, or racially motivated eugenicist?

The word ‘eugenics’, one that we will consider extensively in this presentation, was coined by a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton, in 1883. I don’t think that it is entirely an accident that it was a relation of the great champion of ‘natural selection’ that sought to harness this idea and turn it to practical ends. If nothing else it is a characteristically English response to ‘theory’. Such was the interest, however, in this application of evolutionism that by the early part of the twentieth century ‘eugenics’ (by then a household word) was an eminently fashionable opinion, propagandised not only by great writers such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, but also by industrialists and politicians as well as scientists, including the early organic farmer and vegetarian John Harvey Kellogg of Corn Flakes fame (more on this later), John Maynard Keynes, Sidney Webb, Theodore Roosevelt, and of course Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood of America and the American Birth Control League (the same Sanger accused of planning the elimination of Black Americans through coercive abortion in the infamous Negro Project).[1] Marie Stopes was among these pioneering spirits, inflamed by the utopian ideal of human perfection and beauty that could be planned into existence by genetic science in much the same way as the communists thought they could engineer human souls through socialist planning. Indeed there is an air both of revolutionary militancy and pseudoscience about the whole subject.

What, then, is ‘eugenics’? Sir Francis Galton himself defined it in 1883 as ‘the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations’.[2] The list of its proponents above give some other clues as to the import of this new ‘science’: that human beings are considered primarily in this ‘study’ as ‘racial’ materials; that selective breeding for ‘quality’, on the analogy with crops and farm animals, is the goal of eugenic practice, and consequently anticipates the moral aim of human life; that it is the ‘control’ of birth, primarily, that will serve this aim, and hence the need to alter our understanding of the nature and use of marriage. Despite the left-leaning positions of many of these thinkers, it also becomes patently obvious that it is the poor, the sick, the destitute, and the alien of whatever sort, who are the primary objects of this tender solicitude.

Indeed, one would think, judging by the image she has in the liberal press, that Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was some kind of secular saint, struggling valiantly against procrustean and backward patriarchal oppression in favour of the liberation of women, wrestling sex and marriage from the prurience of the church, and, by today’s standards, pioneering that last great challenge, to save the world from climate change by helping to reduce population growth. Stopes, born in Scotland in 1880, studied botany and geology at University College London, and went on to make a name for herself as a paleobotanist. She was, consequently, very much an evolutionist, and her understanding of humanity, emanating as it does from this philosophy, is very much at the foundation of her work in both birth control and eugenic ‘science’. And of course the University of Manchester is happy to present her on a blue plaque as a great scientist and progressive, not to speak of the commemorative stamp bearing her image issued in 2008. The truth of the matter is a little harder to stomach, however, even if the power of the so-called pro-choice lobby is such that the reality of Marie Stopes’s views and ideas is hardly ever heard. As a matter of fact there was little to separate her in outlook, and even scientific practice, from Dr. Josef Mengele. She was, to put it quite simply, an aggressive racist, and a campaigner for the most breathtakingly punitive forms of eugenic practice. One need only select a few choice quotations from her writings to put the case admirably. So, for example, in a work published in 1920 in The Control of Parenthood, edited by James Marchant, Marie Stopes says of the possibility of leading the human race into a promised ‘utopia’, that:

Those who are grown up in the present active generations, the matured and hardened, with all their weaknesses and flaws, cannot do very much, though they may do something with themselves. They can, however, study the conditions under which they came into being, discover where lie the chief sources of defect, and eliminate those sources of defect from the coming generation so as to remove from those who are still to be born the needless burdens the race has carried.[3]

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[1] If this is usually cited as a conspiracy theory, we shouldn’t necessarily be so dismissive. It is perfectly possible for ‘well-intentioned’ liberal ideas to end up with this kind of policy, without ever being anything less than ‘reasonable’. Take a hypothetical scenario in which one racial minority group is on average less intelligent than the racial majority group. It is more likely that the racial minority group will be submitted to a eugenics program rather than the least intelligent members of the whole population. It’s simply an easier choice for policy makers. See, for example, Richard Lynn, Genetics: A Reassessment (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001).

[2] Cited in Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls and Eight Windows, 2004), p. 18.

[3] Marie C. Stopes, "Racial and Imperial Aspects, (section) II" in The Control of Parenthood, ed. by James Marchant (London: Putnam & Sons, 1920), pp. 208-209 (207-222).

Integrity & Action - day of education and instruction

On Saturday 12^th February, 14 I & A activists met together in London for an afternoon of education and instruction. A lengthy talk was given by Fr Clifton on the subject of liberty, especially the danger of religious liberty as expounded by the Second Vatican Council. This great error has lead to the total undermining of the social reign of Our Lord. Consequently, permissive and pernicious legislation is being passed by our governments with impunity with barely a whimper from Catholics.

This realisation makes it even more incumbent upon us to help restore His social reign every where by all forms of Catholic social action.

The second speaker, Piers Hugill, spoke to us of his research in to Marie Stopes and the vile ideas on eugenics that she propounded. All present were astonished at how anyone holding and propagating such wicked ideas as these could be feted by modern society to the extent that she has a commemorative stamp bearing her picture. We were less surprised that one of the largest companies of baby butchers bears her name. Piers has kindly agreed to let us publish his talk on this blog. We hope that this will serve as the foundation for one of our campaigns in 2011.

Grateful thanks are due to our two speakers and all those who gave up a few hours to help educate themselves about the struggle ahead.