The ideology and politics of birth control in inter-war England

Abstract

Focus in this discussion is on the ideology and politics of birth control in inter-war England. Birth control ideology experienced considerable change in the immediate post World War 1 years. The working class birthrate began to significantly decline during this same period. The primary objective of birth controllers was to legitimize this trend by making birth control information freely available. World War 1 made discussion of birth control easier and physicians came to accept the use of the condom, primarily because of its use as a prophylactic in the fight against venereal disease. The war did not make the Malthusian League's case for birth control any more acceptable nor did it remove moral objections to birth control. Birth control needed a new approach, and this was provided by Marie Stopes. Stopes divorced herself totally from the League and worked to provide a strong scientific justification for birth control, rather than an economic one. She was also determined to come to terms with eugenic opposition to birth control. The scientific nature of her efforts had ideological purpose, and the Society of Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress that she founded in 1921 reflected this. When other groups and individuals began to campaign for birth control in the mid and late 1920s, they all built their arguments on those of Stopes. During the decade of the 1920s the government refused to permit any access to birth control information through the public health service. In 1930 it decided to permit such information to be given to nursing and expectant mothers at maternal and child welfare clinics when further pregnancy was deemed to be detrimental to health. The 1930 decision was a critical first step and meant that birth control had achieved a degree of respectability. An attempt is made in the subsequent discussion to determine why and which parts of the argument formulated by Stopes appealed so widely to physicians, policymakers, and pressure groups and to examine why the official response was so limited and the implications this had for the relationship of women to welfare policy. When the government took the first steps toward granting access to birth control information, it did so on health grounds. No further liberalization of the law occurred and the argument that all women had the right of access to birth control information in order to space and limit the number of births was ignored. The population scare outweighted the case for birth control as a maternal and a racial measure by the mid 1930s.