Passing of the Great Race, Or, the Racial Basis of
European History -
Bobbit 1936
QUOTE
Madison Grant's Passing of The Great Race was not very scientific, although many scientists at the time did support Grant's main claims. However,
on a cultural level, one can see how peoples of northern ancestry tend to be of
a stringer [ sic ] will than those of southern ancestry. Grant makes good arguments for
Nordic superiority, using mostly recorded history rather than prehistoric
anthropology. What I like about this book is that in it Grant warns of impending
extinction of white Americans, especially those of colonial stock, as a result
of unchecked immigration. Today it is relevant, although the problem has
switched from Jews and Italians to Mexicans and other Hispanics. Grant also
makes a good argument for eugenics.
UNQUOTE
Edwin Black, the author of
War Against the Weak- Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
disapproves of this book and all other advocates of eugenics.
The Rising Tide Of Color Against White World-supremacy -
Grant 1926
QUOTE
A reprint of a 1920 classic surveying the world racial
situation after World War I and warning of the coming non-White population
explosion. "The world-wide struggle between the primary races of
mankind...bids fair to be the fundamental problem of the 20th century,
and...perhaps the future."
UNQUOTE
A lot of Englishmen would say that he is right. So would millions of Americans.
What greatly exacerbates the situation is our rulers' enthusiasm for importing
them by the million. Whose agenda are they following? Not ours for sure.
Carnegie
Institution of Washington
QUOTE
"A non-profit scientific research organization specializing in the
physical and biological sciences."
UNQUOTE
They are working in biology among other
things. One of their men got a Nobel Prize which means that he is better than
amateur.
Alexis
Carrel - Eugenicist
QUOTE
(t)he conditioning of petty criminals
with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in
hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have murdered,
robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children,
despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters,
should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic
institutions supplied with proper gasses. A similar treatment could be
advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.".
UNQUOTE
Some of his ideas sound rather brutal but killing off those
who rob the poor could and should include rapacious tax men. Brown, Her
Majesty's Chancellor of the Her Exchequer would be an excellent start. He covers
corrupt politicians too.
Charles Davenport
Was big in biology and eugenics. He seems to
have been prone to make claims that went beyond the evidence.
Eugenics Record
Office
Was where it all happened.
Harry
Laughlin
The Wikipedia doesn't approve of him. He does
not sound awfully nice. Being endorsed by the Nazis is not a good public
relations move.
Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory
Was home to the
Eugenics Record
Office. It is in Long Island, New York.
F. Hoyt Pilcher
Ran the
Kansas State Asylum for Idiotic and Imbecile Youth.
Nobody was beating about the bush here. He sterilized them to prevent them from
breeding. This does not go down awfully well except in Israel where state
brutality is normal.
Eugenics in the United
States - Valone report on the Human Betterment Foundation
This is another hostile source.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/02/22/the-true-story-behind-the-marie-stopes-eugenics-trial-of-1923/
The True Story Behind The Marie Stopes Eugenics Trial Of 1923
Did
the BBC lie to us? Of course; it is a corrupt Marxist
propaganda machine.
QUOTE
In the 1920s, a legal victory against the rising eugenic tide was won
by a Catholic doctor over prominent birth control advocate Marie Stopes.
While Stopes is lauded today as a feminist hero, the story of the eugenics
libel trial has been largely overlooked.
Editor’s note: This is the first of two articles on the >Stopes
v. Sutherland libel trial. The second article can be read here.
In 1923 in Britain, a Catholic doctor won an important victory in the
battle against one of the most harmful ideologies of the 20th century:
eugenics. The battle was fought in the law courts when British birth control
advocate Marie Stopes sued Dr. Halliday Sutherland for libel.
Had Sutherland lost the case, opposition to eugenics in Britain would
have suffered a blow, and would possibly have been silenced altogether.
Sutherland’s success was in large part because he was supported by the most
consistently vociferous critic of eugenics in Britain at that time: the
Catholic Church. But having won the legal battle, Sutherland subsequently
lost the history war when the narrative of the losing side became the
received history.
It is time to correct the record and, what’s more, demonstrate why it
matters today. Recent developments in biotechnology mean that eugenics is
back. The issues in Stopes v. Sutherland are still relevant today
and, when the centenaries of past events are commemorated in the next few
years, it is essential that the correct narrative is used to influence the
contemporary debate.
The centenary in 2023 of the Stopes v. Sutherland trial will be
an opportunity to challenge the falsehoods of the last 100 years. Catholics
can reflect on the Church’s record of standing up for ordinary people
against the master plan of the elites. Remembering these events will help to
educate and inspire those who will take up the cause in the contemporary
debate.
“Fake histories are warehouses to store fake news.”
There’s lots of “fake news” around these days, isn’t there? This article
is about one of the sources of fake news—fake history.
Here’s an example from the BBC’s
online biography of Marie Stopes:
In 1921, Stopes opened a family planning clinic in Holloway, north
London, the first in the country. It offered a free service to married women
and also gathered data about contraception. In 1925, the clinic moved to
central London and others opened across the country. By 1930, other family
planning organisations had been set up and they joined forces with Stopes to
form the National Birth Control Council (later the Family Planning
Association).
The Catholic church was Stopes’ fiercest critic. In 1923, Stopes sued
Catholic doctor Halliday Sutherland for libel. She lost, won at appeal and
then lost again in the House of Lords, but the case generated huge publicity
for Stopes’ views.
Stopes continued to campaign for women to have better access to birth
control…
A second example of “fake history” is a 2015 press release from Marie
Stopes International celebrating the 90th anniversary of the establishment
of Stopes’ second London clinic:
90 years ago a woman called Marie Stopes made an extraordinary decision.
She would open a service in the heart of London that offered women access to
free contraception. In 1925, three years before women would win the right to
vote, Marie Stopes bucked convention by showing women they had a choice
regarding whether and when to have children.
On what grounds do I say that these items are “fake”? In my
opinion, they are fake because of what they leave out.
There is no mention of Stopes’ eugenic agenda or of her intention to
achieve, in her own words, “a reduction of the birth rate at the wrong part
and increase of the birth rate at the right end of the social scale.”
No mention of her view that, as she put it in 1924:
From the point of view of the economics of the nation, it is racial
madness to rifle the pockets of the thrifty and intelligent who are
struggling to do their best for their own families of one and two and
squander the money on low grade mental deficients, the spawn of drunkards,
the puny families of women so feckless and deadened that they apathetically
breed like rabbits.
No mention was made that she advocated the compulsorily sterilization of
the “unfit,” nor of her lobbying the British Prime Minister and the
Parliament to pass the appropriate legislation.
No mention of the vituperative language she used to describe those whom
she desired to see sterilized: “hopelessly bad cases, bad through inherent
disease, or drunkenness or character” …“wastrels, the diseased…the miserable
[and] the criminal”…“degenerate, feeble minded and unbalanced”…“parasites.”
No mention is made of the “bedrock” tenets of the Society for
Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, set up by Stopes to run her
clinics: “to furnish security from conception to those who are racially
diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way
unfitted for parenthood.”
No reasons were given as to why the doctor opposed her. Dr. Sutherland
opposed Stopes because he opposed eugenics. His opposition began many years
before, when he was nominally a Presbyterian and in practice an atheist.
No mention was made of the fact that Dr. Sutherland specialized in
tuberculosis, an infective disease of poverty. This fact is key, because it
brought him into direct conflict with eugenicists (more commonly known at
the time as “eugenists”). Eugenists believed that susceptibility to
tuberculosis was primarily an inherited condition, so their “cure” was to
breed out the tuberculous types. While Sutherland and others were trying to
prevent and cure tuberculosis, influential eugenists believed their efforts
were a waste of time. Furthermore, these eugenists thought tuberculosis was
a “friend of the race” because it was a natural check on the unfit, killing
them before they could reproduce.
Of course, both the BBC biography and the press release are brief
summaries and, as such, cannot include all of the details that I have
outlined. But that’s not the point. The point is that neither item properly
summarizes the issues. The excision of Stopes’ eugenic agenda makes her a
secular saint. How could anyone oppose her in good conscience?
And that’s the question that brought me to where I am now. As a grandson
of Dr. Sutherland, I often wondered why he opposed her, because I used to
believe the fake version of this story myself. No one—family or
otherwise—told me differently. Following many hours of research, including
the examination of Dr. Sutherland’s personal papers, I now know a different
version of events.
Who was Halliday Sutherland?
Halliday Gibson Sutherland was born in 1882, and was educated at Glasgow
High School and Merchiston Castle School, Edinburgh. He studied medicine at
Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and he graduated in 1908. At that time, he came
under the influence of Robert Philip, who pioneered modern anti-tuberculosis
treatments.
Tuberculosis was responsible for one-ninth of the total death-rate in
Britain at the time. Tuberculosis killed over 70,000 victims, and disabled
at least 150,000 more each year. Given that the disease often killed the
bread-winner of a family, it was “the direct cause of one-eleventh of the
pauperism in England and Wales, a charge on the State of one million
sterling per annum,” Sutherland wrote in 1911.
In 1910, Sutherland was appointed the Medical Officer for the St.
Marylebone Dispensary for the Prevention of Tuberculosis. In 1911, he edited
and contributed to a book on tuberculosis by international experts.
Sutherland’s religious journey is pertinent to this story. He was
baptized a Presbyterian. In August 1904, at the age of 22, he was “in theory
an agnostic and in practice an atheist,” he would later write. Ten years
later, “there came the hazards of war, and for me the time had come when it
was expedient to make my peace with God.” At that point he was admitted to
the Church of Scotland. He became a Catholic in 1919.
The birth rate, Malthusianism, and eugenics
Also relevant to this story is the falling birth rate, and two groups
which had strong views about population.
Britain’s birth rate increased from 1800 onwards. In 1876, it peaked at
36.3 per thousand, and began to fall. By the end of 1901 it had fallen 21
percent, and by nearly 34 percent by 1914.
Not everyone was worried about the fall in birth-rate; one group in
particular, the Malthusians, welcomed the fall.
It was T.R. Malthus (1766-1834) who had observed: “The power of
population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce
subsistence for man.”
He drew up his “natural law,” that when the population increased beyond
subsistence, the resulting competition for resources would lead to conflict,
famine, and disease. Sexual abstinence was the way to keep the population at
manageable levels. In the period of the Stopes v. Sutherland libel
trial, the term “Neo-Malthusian” was used to differentiate Malthusians who
advocated the use of contraceptives instead of abstinence.
Another group keenly interested in population were the eugenists. The
word “eugenics” was coined by Sir Francis Galton, cousin of the naturalist
Charles Darwin. But while the word was new, the idea was not; G.K.
Chesterton described it as “one of the most ancient follies of the earth.”
In the decades before the Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial,
eugenists were concerned about the “differential birth rate,” so-called
because the poor were producing more children than the rich. Given that
British eugenists used social class as a proxy for a person’s racial
fitness, it was clear that the worst “stocks” would be the progenitors of
Britain’s future population. For this reason, British eugenists fretted
about “degeneration” and “race suicide.”
While there was rivalry between the Malthusian League and the Eugenics
Education Society, and they differed strongly over the use of
contraceptives, both groups agreed that in relation to population, quality
mattered. The areas of overlap meant that some people were members of both
the League and the Society. One such person was Marie Stopes.
Sutherland’s opposition to eugenics
The reader of this article might assume that doctors cure diseases; this,
however, was not always a pressing concern for some influential minds in
medicine and science at the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in
relation to tuberculosis.
Sir James Barr, president of the British Medical Association (“BMA”),
provides an excellent example of the attitude of many of those in the
medical establishment of the time. At the BMA’s annual conference in
Liverpool in 1912, Barr was explicit that “moral and physical degenerates
should not be allowed to take any part in adding to the race.” He then he
turned his attention to tuberculosis:
If we could only abolish the tubercle bacillus in these islands we would
get rid of tuberculous disease, but we should at the same time raise up a
race peculiarly susceptible to this infection—a race of hothouse plants
which would not flourish in any other environment. … Nature, on the
other hand, weeds out those who have not got the innate power of recovery
from disease, and by means of the tubercle bacillus and other pathogenic
organisms she frequently does this before the reproductive age, so that a
check is put on the multiplication of idiots and the feeble-minded. Nature’s
methods are thus of advantage to the race rather than to the individual.
Sutherland’s opposition to this mindset and to eugenics can be traced to
the article “The Soil and the Seed in Tuberculosis,” published in the
British Medical Journal on November 23, 1912. In it, he recognised that
doctors had traditionally believed in an “inherited disposition” to
tuberculosis, and admitted that he had been one of them. Now he had changed
his mind.
Sutherland again spoke out against eugenics on September 4, 1917, when he
addressed the National Council of the YMCA. He rebutted the notion that
consumption was hereditary, and he attacked the eugenists:
But why should you set out to prevent this infection and to cure the
disease? There are some self-styled eugenists…who declaim that the
prevention of disease is not in itself a good thing. They say the efficiency
of the State is based upon what they call “the survival of the fittest.”
[World War I] has smashed their rhetorical phrase. Who talks now about
survival of the fittest, or thinks himself fit because he survives? I don’t
know what they mean. I do know that in preventing disease you are not
preserving the weak, but conserving the strong.
His disagreement with eugenists, previously on medical and scientific
grounds, was now on ethical and moral grounds as well.
Married Love
In March 1918, Marie Stopes’ book Married Love was published,
became a bestseller, and made her a celebrity. According to biographer June
Rose:
Marie had written Married Love for women like herself, educated
middle-class wives who had been left ignorant of the physical side of
marriage. Her tone in her book and in the letters of advice sent to readers
implied that they shared a community of interests and of income. She had no
particular interest in the lower classes and in Wise Parenthood had
written censoriously of the “less thrifty and conscientious” who bred
rapidly and produced children “weakened and handicapped by physical as well
as mental warping and weakness.” “The lower classes were,” she wrote in a
letter to the Leicester Daily Post, “often thriftless, illiterate
and careless.”
It was in her other books that the eugenic agenda was more clearly
expressed. In Radiant Motherhood, she urged the compulsory
sterilization of “wastrels, the diseased…the miserable…the criminal.”
Stopes and her husband opened the “Mother’s Clinic” in Marlborough Road,
Holloway on March 17, 1921. She established the Society for Constructive
Birth Control and Racial Progress to run the clinic. She engaged
eminent people as vice-presidents of her society, including Bertrand
Russell, H.G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, and Sir James Barr.
Birth Control
On July 7, 1921, Sutherland attended a talk at the Medico-Legal Society
by Dr. Louise McIlroy, professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and first
female professor at the Royal Free Hospital. In the discussion that followed
her presentation, McIlroy addressed the negative physical effects of
contraceptives. Sutherland, by this time a Catholic, wrote an article in
which he observed that the medical profession now concurred with Catholic
doctrine. The editor of The Month, in which the article appeared,
suggested that he develop it into a book.
Sutherland wrote Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine
Against the Neo-Malthusians. Despite the title, the book was very
political and it described Malthusianism as “an attack on the poor.” It was
a polemic for the fair treatment of the poor, and for an equitable structure
in society to share the abundance of wealth. His conclusion foreshadows the
demographic problems that developed nations face today:
The Catholic Church has never taught that “an avalanche of children”
should be brought into the world regardless of the consequences. God is not
mocked; as men sow, so shall they reap, and against a law of nature both the
transient amelioration wrought by philanthropists and the subtle expediences
of scientific politicians are alike futile. If our civilisation is to
survive we must abandon those ideals that lead to decline.
The libel suit
In Birth Control, under the heading “Exposing the Poor to
Experiment,” Sutherland wrote:
But, owing to their poverty, lack of learning, and helplessness, the poor
are natural victims of those who seek to make experiments on their fellows.
In the midst of a London slum a woman, who is a doctor of German philosophy
(Munich), has opened a Birth Control Clinic, where working women are
instructed in a method of contraception described by Professor McIlroy as
“the most harmful method of which I have had experience.” When we remember
that millions are being spent by the Ministry of Health and by Local
Authorities—on pure milk for necessitous expectant and nursing mothers
before and after childbirth, for the provision of skilled midwives, and on
Infant Welfare Centres—all for the single purpose of bringing healthy
children into our midst, it is truly amazing this monstrous campaign of
birth control should be tolerated by the Home Secretary.
Shortly after the book was published on March 27, 1922, Humphrey Roe,
Stopes’ husband, wrote to Sutherland inviting him to publicly debate his
wife. Sutherland did not respond to the letter, and a month later, he
received a writ for libel.
UNQUOTE
Useful Idiots should be treated with
contempt, especially when they claim that they have superior intellects.
Stopes v. Sutherland The legal battle between a eugenicist and a Catholic doctor
QUOTE
The true story of Marie Stopes’ libel suit against Dr. Halliday
Sutherland is instructive for those fighting today’s eugenicists.
(Left) Marie Stopes in her
laboratory in 1904 (image via Wikipedia); (right) Dr. Halliday
Sutherland in 1910 (image via hallidaysutherland.com).
Editor’s Note: This is the second and final article on the
Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial of 1923. The
first article discussed the background of the case, including UK
birth-control advocate Marie Stopes’ enthusiastic interest in eugenics
and Dr. Halliday Sutherland’s opposition to that movement, based both on
his Catholic faith and on his work with tuberculosis, a disease seen by
many eugenists of the day as a “friend of the race” because it was a
natural check on the “unfit.” When Sutherland published his book
Birth Control in 1922, he accused Stopes’ of using her work
distributing contraceptives among poor women as a eugenic experiment
targeting society’s most vulnerable. In response, Stopes sued Sutherland
for libel.
The court battle
Sutherland faced huge obstacles. His first problem was money: he
quickly ran out of it and planned to defend himself. However, a friend
approached Cardinal Bourne of Westminster and shortly afterward
Sutherland received a message that Bourne would “stand by him to the
end” and assist him with legal costs.
Sutherland’s second problem was that his defense of “justification”
would require him to demonstrate that, while the statements he had made
about Marie Stopes were defamatory, they were true in substance and in
fact.
Stopes engaged Mr. Patrick Hastings, KC, who planned the route to a
win for the plaintiff. In Hastings’ opening speech, Stopes was depicted
as an eminent scientist providing contraceptives and advice to help her
overburdened and poorer sisters. He did not mention her eugenic agenda.
Sutherland’s claims that she was experimenting on the poor would be
exposed for what they were, Hastings said: a violent attack on dignity
of this charitable woman’s good works and on those who did not agree
with the tenets of the Catholic faith.
Both sides called witnesses who were, as Hastings pointed out in his
opening speech, “known throughout the length and breadth of the
civilized world.” The eminence of the witnesses on one side cancelled
out those on the other.
The defense would counter that the devices advocated by Stopes were
unreliable and dangerous, and that her work with the poor amounted to
experimenting on the vulnerable. Her publisher had been accused of
publishing an obscene work, so they would portray Stopes’ books as being
likely to corrupt young and impressionable people.
How and why did the defense win? In my opinion, there were four main
factors, namely, the testimony of Stopes herself, the testimony of
Professor McIlroy, the role played by the “gold pin,” and finally, the
testimony of Dr. Norman Haire.
The testimony of Stopes
Stopes’ testimony was damaging to her own case for a number of
reasons. The first was that she was not required to enter the witness
box; it was the job of the defense to justify the defamatory statements,
not for the plaintiff to rebut them. Her testimony added unnecessary
risks to her own side.
Once she was in the witness box, Stopes volunteered statements which
undermined her counsel’s arguments. For instance, in his opening speech,
Hastings had not mentioned eugenics, yet in the examination by Hastings,
Stopes brought her eugenic agenda to the fore:
The object of the Society [for Constructive Birth Control and Racial
Progress] is, if possible, to counteract the steady evil which has been
growing for a good many years of the reduction of the birth rate just on
the part of the thrifty, wise, well-contented, and the generally sound
members of our community, and the reckless breeding from the C.3 end
[“C.3” referred to those who were rejected as being physically unfit for
military service], and the semi-feebleminded, the careless, who are
proportionately increasing in our community because of the slowing of
the birth rate at the other end of the social scale. Statistics show
that every year the birth rate from the worst end of our community is
increasing in proportion to the birth rate at the better end, and it was
in order to try to right that grave social danger that I embarked upon
this work.
There was a chance, of course, that members of the jury might have
had eugenic sympathies, but statements such as these from Stopes did
increase the chance that the defense would succeed in its argument that
Stopes’ work was a social experiment with eugenic goals.
When cross-examined, Stopes “took on” the defense counsel rather than
focus on answering questions. When asked about why Dr. Norman Haire (a
Malthusian doctor) had visited her clinic, she told the court that he
had been seeking referral patients with whom he could fit the “gold pin”
contraceptive device. Seeking referrals in this manner was against the
code of conduct of doctors, and Haire denied he’d done so. The result
was that Haire, who should have been an ideological ally of Stopes,
became a hostile witness when it came time for his testimony.
Next, when cross-examined by the defense, Stopes lost her temper.
That she did so was entirely understandable; she had been in the witness
box for several hours and was asked a rather unclear question about
viewing children as a curse in marriage. But petulantly asking if this
included “an imbecile or monster or degenerate or diseased child”
ultimately undermined her lawyer’s effort to depict Stopes’ work as a
quiet, charitable endeavor above any criticism.
By contrast, when it came time for Sutherland to testify, he gave
straightforward answers. He later wrote that he had prayed to St. Thomas
More, Lord Chancellor of England, who had been executed in 1535 because
he refused to renounce the Catholic faith.
When under questioning from his lawyer, Mr. Ernest Charles, KC,
Sutherland described Stopes’ social experimentation as: “The
indiscriminate distribution of knowledge of contraceptives amongst the
poor for the purpose of attempting to redistribute the birth rate by
means of artificial contraceptives and contrary to the law of nature.”
When cross-examined by Hastings, Sutherland’s continued his plain
words, without embellishment or speechifying. Hastings tried to provoke
him, suggesting that his book was “a violent attack upon people who
believe in the Protestant faith and are not Catholics.”
The Lord Chief Justice, sensitive to the sectarian divisions of
Britain at the time, intervened, saying that the “likes and dislikes
about Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are not relevant to any issue
in the case.”
In his testimony, Sutherland had focused on his role in the case, and
left the legal argument to his lawyers. No doubt the period he spent in
the witness box was an ordeal, but he had answered truthfully and had
not damaged his case.
The evidence of Professor McIlroy
The testimony of Professor Louise McIlroy was very damaging to Stopes. McIlroy was, like Stopes, a woman. Like Sutherland, she was a Catholic
doctor. She disagreed with what she considered to be the Church’s
out-of-date position on birth control, and dispensed contraceptives free
of charge at the Royal Free Hospital for Women. McIlroy was the first
female professor of gynecology at the Royal Free Hospital for Women, and
she was in many ways ahead of her time. For instance, when appropriate,
she would arrange for wife and husband to attend appointments together
so that she could advise both spouses on contraceptive methods. She also
advocated paid maternity leave for women.
McIlroy was quoted in Sutherland’s book as describing a contraceptive
device used in Stopes’ clinic as “the most harmful method of which I
have had experience.” The achievements and expertise she brought to her
testimony in support of Sutherland’s case would prove highly effective
for the defense.
The “gold pin” and the testimony of Dr. Norman Haire
The “gold pin” was an early form of what is now known as “the coil,”
a pessary inserted into the uterus for contraceptive purposes.
Stopes was interested in the pin when she heard that it was effective
contraceptive. In Wise Parenthood she recommended its use to
effectively sterilize “the lowest and most negligent strata of society”
because, once in place, it could not removed without expert assistance.
For Stopes, this was its “greatest possible racial and social value.”
There was no evidence that Stopes had used the gold pin at her
clinic, but she did send two patients to Dr. Norman Haire to be fitted
with the device, despite his having told her that it was dangerous.
Throughout the case, Sutherland’s counsel, Mr. Charles, asked each
witness what the gold pin was for. Some said that it would enhance
conception. Others, that it would induce an abortion. The divided
opinions of the medical profession enabled Charles to persuasively argue
that the device was uncertain and therefore experimental.
Dr. Haire, displeased by Stopes’ assertion during her testimony that
he had trawled her clinic for new patients to be fitted with the gold
pin, testified under subpoena for the defense on February 27, 1923. His
evidence against Stopes was damning. He said that the contraceptive
device used by her clinic was “utterly unreliable,” that women could not
fit it properly, and that, when he had fitted it in women, it had failed
24 times in 29 cases.
The verdict
On February 28, 1923, the penultimate day of the trial, the jury was
given four questions to answer. They retired at 4 pm and returned
at 7:55 pm. The foreman of the jury passed a piece of paper to the
judge. On it was written their answers.
The Lord Chief Justice read from the paper. “(1) Were the words
complained of defamatory of the Plaintiff?—Yes. (2) Were they true in
substance and in fact?—Yes. (3) Were they fair comment?…”
At this point, the judge noticed something odd. The answer to
question 3 was unclear. Handing the paper to the foreman of the jury, he
said: “Would you look at that, Mr. Foreman? Two words have been written:
which is the final one?” The foreman marked the paper and handed it
back.
The Lord Chief Justice continued: “(3) Were they fair comment?—No.
(4) Damages, if any?—£100.”
At this point, lawyers for the plaintiff and the defendant asked for
judgement. Given the late hour, the Lord Chief Justice decided that
arguments would be heard the following morning.
The next day, the plaintiff’s lawyers argued that they had won the
case. The words complained of were defamatory and fell into two classes:
statements of fact, and statements of opinion. According to the findings
of the jury, while the defense had succeeded in justifying the
statements of fact as true, they had failed to convince the jury that
the statements of opinion were fair comment. On this basis, the
plaintiff’s lawyer said that they were entitled to judgement on the
findings and for damages of £100.
For the defense, Charles disagreed, arguing that the plaintiff’s
lawyer could not point to a single case where the jury’s decision that
the words complained of were true in substance and in fact was not the
end of the matter. In other words, as soon as the jury had answered the
second question “yes,” they should have stopped there. The Lord Chief
Justice agreed with them.
Sutherland and his anti-eugenist supporters had won.
Stopes appealed the decision and won at the Court of Appeal 2-1, on
the grounds that the judge had not adequately briefed the jury.
Sutherland counter-appealed to the House of Lords, who supported him
4-1.
Why it matters
I recently met an eminent historian of the period and we discussed
eugenics. She remarked that she would have preferred to deal with the
eugenists of 100 years ago to the eugenicists of today. This surprised
me, so I asked her why. She replied that the eugenists of 100 years ago
were forthright about their aims, while their modern counterparts
obfuscate.
And she was right. The opprobrium attached to eugenics by the end of
the Second World War has meant that it has become more discreet. The
“Eugenics Education Society” is now the nondescript “Galton Institute.”
Enthusiasts no longer talk about “Superman” or the “unfit” but of “human
potential” and “viability” and the “nuchal translucency scan.” Eugenics
is still with us, but hidden in plain sight.
We live in a time in which genetic science continues to advance
rapidly, for good and for ill. Science is complex. It’s going to be a
challenge to get people interested in highly-technical descriptions of
sub-microscopic events. And even if you do get them to understand, are
they going to be able to explain it to someone else?
The true story of battle between Stopes and Sutherland—as opposed to
the widely-held narrative that this was a case of a noble humanitarian
being persecuted by the Catholic Church—enables Catholics to reflect on
their history and inspire those who will fight the battle in our era.
UNQUOTE
In the long term we lost.
Errors & omissions,
broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever;
if you find any I am open to comment.
Email me at Mike
Emery.
All financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want to keep it
private, use my PGP Key.
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