By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign

6. The Abortion Campaign: Feminism, Eugenics, and Public Policy

Chapter 6 The Abortion Campaign Feminism, Eugenics, and Public Policy Politics, the “Underclass,” and Reproductive Technology: Continuity of Campaigning? The hypothesis for this work is that the predominant influences on the abortion campaign have been eugenics and Malthusianism, and this was found to be the case regarding the early campaign, to the extent that it was part of the eugenics/Malthusian nexus. Even campaigners using feminist arguments employed a eugenics caveat, such as Stella Browne, who advocated the right to separate sex from procreation, but thought that procreation should be done for the “Race” and that unwanted children should not be born.1 The Steel campaign was found to be under similar influences, even more clearly highlighted by events after the act. However, long before this, the perfect vehicle for delivering eugenics had been created by J. M. Keynes, William Beveridge, and Richard Titmuss: the welfare state. All three were eugenicists; the Eugenics Society had seen the welfare state’s potential2 and, in 1945, proposed abortion as a population control measure, 287   1. Evidence to Birkett Enquiry (MH71-23). 2. The economist Lord John Maynard Keynes was a long-standing member of the Eugenics Society (vice president and fellow, 1937) who wrote The End of Laissez Faire in 1926 and adhered to Malthusian conclusions in his Galton lecture, “Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population” (1937). The welfare state was predicated on planning, compulsory insurance, and full employment; this was a particular public concern after the high unemployment of the 1930s (see Addison 1975), although the potential for tailoring the population to fill the employment require- echoed in the 1950s by ALRA’s legal advisor, Glanville Williams.3 Such ideas were taken into the heart of government by Roy Jenkins, who as home secretary could have reduced backstreet abortion, but covertly engineered Steel’s bill while claiming neutrality on it; in fact he supported it in Parliament with arguments about thalidomide and the “life of suffering and hopeless inadequacy” of disabled people. Like many abortion advocates , he drew a false moral equivalence between killing affected fetuses and “condemning them to half life,” offering abortion as a solution to the problem of disability despite lack of demand from those most closely involved; he also supported the “unfit mother” clause. Jenkins said that “real” abortion reform would bring “important far-reaching change” but that “opinion” was “ready” for it.4 Even before his appointment as home secretary, he signaled a eugenic version of reform; warning against the redistribution of wealth via taxation, he acknowledged that child poverty still needed to be addressed, but claimed “a lot of our objectives” could be achieved “without the expenditure of public money”:5 “[W]e exist as a party, not only to make a more comfortable society for all its members, but ments was seen by eugenicists. The first governor of the World Bank (1946), Keynes was responsible for the shift away from laissez faire economics formalized at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. He was an influential member of the Cambridge Apostles, a secret university society that became synonymous with homosexuality, Marxism, and spying in the 1930s (see Deacon 1986) and also a member of the sexually open Bloomsbury Group, in which promiscuity and abortion featured prominently (see Nicholson 2003). Sir William Henry Beveridge KC was on the Eugenics Society Council (1928) and consultative council (1937; 1957); his Galton lecture of 1943 called for higher children’s allowances for the better-off to be phased in (“Eugenic Aspects of Children’s Allowances,” Eugenics Review 34 (1943), 117–23). He was a civil servant, and later a director of the London School of Economics (LSE) (1919–37). His Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942) was a best seller, seen as the product of wartime consensus, but actually encouraged and supported by a network of committees and campaigns such as the 1941 Committee (heavily influenced by eugenicists), the Next Five Years Group (supposedly representing a “middle way” between bosses and workers but excluding trade unionists), and the PEP (the society gave £1,850 to the Population and Resources [PEP] Enquiry [1953]). Richard Titmuss was professor of social administration at the LSE (1950–73); he influenced the Finer Report on One-Parent Families (1974) and worked with Francois Lafitte and Brian Abel-Smith. A Eugenics Society member (1937) and editor of the Eugenics Review (1942), he was on the Eugenics Society’s council (1942–43) and a fellow (1957). He was also a member of the...