Eugenics advocate and heroine of pro-abortion campaigners Marie Stopes is to be included in Royal Mail’s new stamp series depicting Women of Distinction.
Stopes opened Britain’s first birth control clinic in 1921. Each year in Britain, 60,000 pregnancies are terminated in her name by Marie Stopes International, a leading abortion provider, according to newspaper reports.
Royal Mail said that the women for the series had been chosen by a group of female academics and historians “asked for their views of the women they believed had a big impact on other women’s lives over the past 100 years.”
However, the inclusion of Stopes has provoked criticism from pro-life groups and others who point to her eugenicist views.
Chaplain to the Stock Exchange Peter Mullen, who is Rector of St Michael’s in the City of London, said: “She campaigned to have the poor, the sick and people of mixed race sterilised.”
He added: “The managers of the Royal Mail deserve to be condemned for their honouring Marie Stopes.”
Anthony Ozimic of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said: “Praising Marie Stopes as a woman of distinction should be as unacceptable as praising Adolf Hitler as a great leader.
“Both promoted compulsory sterilisation and thereby the eventual elimination of society’s most vulnerable members to achieve what they called racial progress.”
Writing in his blog on The Daily Telegraph’s website, Gerald Warner said: “Considering the hysteria nowadays attaching to issues of race, at first sight it seems extraordinary that Stopes should have earned commemoration on a stamp.
“To the PC establishment, however, even racist peccadilloes can be ignored to honour a pioneer who helped promote the anti-life culture and relieve women of the intolerable trauma of giving birth to a child with a cleft palate.”