Marie Stopes - Abortion Views

Abortion Views

Stopes was strongly against the termination of a pregnancy once it had started: her clinics did not offer the possibility during her life. She saw birth control as the way families should limit their size.

It is worth noting some of her views on abortion either in statement or in action.

• "The desolating effects of attempted abortion can only be exterminated by a sound knowledge of the control of conception."

• "America, on the other hand, where the outrageous 'Comstock' laws confuse wise scientific control with illegal abortion of lives already begun and labels them both as obscene, has, by thus preventing people from obtaining decent hygienic knowledge, fostered criminal and illicit operations."

• The nurses at her clinic had to sign a declaration in which they swore not to "impart any information or lend any assistance whatsoever to any person calculated to lead to the destruction in utero of the products of conception."

• When Stopes discovered that a certain William Carpenter displayed her name on a birth control and abortion clinic he ran, she took steps to have him arrested and imprisoned.

• Stopes wrote to the Courier-Mail of Brisbane in 1938, saying, "I was glad you gave space to the fact that the Queensland Medical Association is planning "an extensive educational campaign against the evil of abortion." The majority of married women do not realise the frightful injury they do to themselves and to their possible future children by an abortion."

• When it came to her notice that one of Avro Manhattan's woman friends had had an abortion, Stopes accused him of "murdering" the child.