Marie Stopes International, one of the world’s largest abortion providers, is changing its name due to unwanted attention that its founder was a eugenicist and a racist.
Like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, who established Britain’s first birth control clinic in London in 1921, was a racist who opposed interracial marriages and promoted the forced sterilization of inferior people she considered unfit to procreate.
Starting Tuesday, abortion and contraception provider Marie Stopes International will be known as MSI Reproductive Choices, leaders of the organization announced.
Stopes advocated fiercely for eugenic programs, an effort to rid society of the weak and undesirable, notoriously practiced by the Nazis against Jews and disabled persons, and by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger against blacks and minorities in the United States.
Arguing in 1920 for compulsory sterilization of the unfit, Stopes said that failure to do so would yield an “ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who will devastate social customs… like the parasite upon a healthy tree.”
In July 1922, Stopes wrote an editorial in Birth Control News, a self-published magazine:
Sterilisation of the unfit raises a hornet’s nest, but no one worries at all about the daily sterilisation now going on of the fit. Young married men of the professional classes are today often forced by conditions to remain sterile, though they passionately desire the healthy children they could have if they did not have hordes of defectives to support in one way or the other.
Unsurprisingly, Stopes was also an ardent fan of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. A poem she wrote in 1942 at the height of the Jewish Holocaust read, “Catholics and Prussians, The Jews and the Russians, All are a curse, Or something worse.”
While the group said that the change in its name was meant as “a clear signal that we neither adhere to nor condone” the views of its founder, its present practices suggest something different.
Marie Stopes International currently operates more than 600 clinics in 37 countries around the world, many of them targeting blacks in sub-Saharan Africa.
The organization has offices or abortion clinics in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal, Niger, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Madagascar, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
According to data from its website, the organization took the lives of 2,628,900 unborn African children in 2019 alone, far more than the sum of all the abortions it performed in predominantly white Europe, North and South America, and Australia combined.
In 2017, the UK Care Quality Commission accused Marie Stopes International of paying staff bonuses to promote abortions and harassing mothers who change their minds about the procedure.
This past summer, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York (PPGNY) removed the name of the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, from its flagship abortion facility in New York City because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement.”
The organization said it will work with city officials to “rename an honorary street sign that marks the ‘Margaret Sanger Square’ at the intersection of Bleecker and Mott Streets in Manhattan.”