“Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it” by Mark H. Sutherland (with Neil Sutherland)

Britain 1921: A eugenic society was founded to create a race of well-formed, well-endowed, beautiful men and women. The Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress aimed to increase the offspring of the wise, healthy and well-to-do, while reducing the progeny of the poor, weak and unemployed. It lobbied Parliament to pass laws to compulsorily sterilize “undesirables” and set up a clinic to achieve the “reduction of the birth rate at the wrong part and increase of the birth rate at the right end of the social scale.”

The founder, Marie Stopes, was supported by some of the most eminent persons of her time: John Maynard Keynes, Lady Constance Lytton, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells as well as members of the medical and political establishments. Sir James Barr, ex-president of the British Medical Association, congratulated her for inaugurating “a great movement which I hope will eventually get rid of our C3 population and exterminate poverty. The only way to raise an A1 population is to breed them.”

Halliday Sutherland was a Scottish doctor in the forefront of the fight against tuberculosis, a disease of poverty that killed 70,000 Britons each year at that time. It led him to speak out against eugenics and, later, Dr. Stopes when he accused her of “exposing the poor to experiment.” He condemned her work, saying that if children were denied the poor as the privilege of the rich, Britain would become a servile state. Stopes sued him for libel. Their acrimonious legal dispute ran for over two years and went all the way to the House of Lords.

Exterminating Poverty is the true story of a Scottish doctor’s brave stand against Britain’s eugenic establishment, told for the very first time.

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Photo credit / acknowledgement

Main page: Photograph of the House of Lords by Francis Godolphin Osbourne Stuart (English, active ca. 1860-ca. 1889) Architect: Barry & Pugin

This website features the:

  • Racial Rubber vault cap, London, England, 1915-1925. Science Museum, London. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
  • Prorace cervical cap. A606510 Science Museum Group Collection Online. Accessed 5 February 2024. https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co96336/prorace-cervical-cap-cervical-cap.