Racist origins of UK abortion law

Ghastly though Margaret Sanger was, she was an angel next to Britain’s Marie Stopes, voted “Woman of the Millennium” by Guardian readers in 1999 and in 2008 honoured on a UK postage stamp. Stopes once said: "Utopia could be reached in my lifetime, had I the power to issue inviolable edicts… I would legislate compulsory sterilisation of the insane, feeble-minded… revolutionaries… half-castes." Stopes was so obsessed with improving the gene pool that she wrote love poems for Hitler.

After the war, when Hitler had rather given the whole sterilisation thing a bad name, the eugenics crowd turned to legalised abortion as the next best thing. The Abortion Law Reform Association formed to pass the 1967 Abortion Act. The ALRA was founded by five members of the Eugenics Society. Today in Britain, as Department of Health figures for 2008 show, black women exercise their right to choose proportionately more often than white women. Telegraph

No comments:

Post a Comment