Notable Landmarks · London, Greater London
The Mothers' Clinic for Constructive Birth Control
Britain's first birth-control clinic opened here on 17 March 1921, offering free contraceptive advice to married women. Its importance to women's bodily autonomy and Marie Stopes's support for eugenics both belong in the record.
The story
On 17 March 1921, Marie Stopes and her husband Humphrey Verdon Roe opened Britain's first birth-control clinic in an ordinary house at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway. It was free, open to married women only, staffed by midwives with a visiting doctor, and deliberately run by women so that patients need not be examined by men. A woman was fitted with a small high-domed rubber cervical cap — Stopes's own design, sold at cost — and shown how to use it, sometimes with a soluble quinine pessary; Stopes disapproved of condoms, withdrawal and the "safe period". About three women a day came in the first year; the clinic's 1925 report, The First Five Thousand, claimed under one per cent of patients fell pregnant, and by 1929 some ten thousand women had been advised.
Stopes had come to the cause after a first marriage annulled in 1916 for non-consummation, and after two 1918 books — Married Love, which insisted women had sexual desire and a right to satisfaction, and Wise Parenthood, a contraception manual. Opposition was fierce, above all from the Catholic Church, which bankrolled the doctor she sued for libel in 1923 (she won at first, then lost in the Lords).
But her cap was branded "Pro-Race" for a reason. Stopes was an ardent eugenicist who wanted the poor to have fewer children, advocated sterilising the "unfit", disinherited her own son for marrying a short-sighted woman, and sent Hitler a book of her poems in 1939. She gave hundreds of thousands of women control over their bodies, and she held indefensible views. Both are true.
More stories at this spot
Sources
- Women's History Network
- ASU Embryo Project
- University of London, "The Centenary of Britain's First Birth Control Clinic"
- Science Museum Group, "'Prorace' cervical cap"
- Wikisource, Wise Parenthood (15th ed.), ch. 4
- BBC News, "Abortion provider changes name over Marie Stopes eugenics link"
- Wikipedia, "Harry Stopes-Roe"
- The Life Institute, "Marie Stopes"
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Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.