GOnce she wrote Catholic birth- control method left it chained Westminster g

RUPTUS and the so-called safe period, those most psychologically and physically punishing means of contraception, are still the only birth control methods allowed to the faithful by the multitude of bleak clerics who run the Catholic For many centuries, and over issues ranging from the movement of the planets to the origin of life, scientists have done battle with this reactionary monolith.

In the past 200 years the issue has often centred on the right of people to decide for themselves how many children to have.

Many liberals and reformers have been warmed and even given a pink glow by the heat generated in such battles.

Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell were two such people; their triend Marie stopes, staunch fighter for married love and birth control, was another.

Contradictions Last week the programme •Marie Stopes-Sexual Revolutionary, (BBC-1, June 25) attempted a biography of her.

Although very much of her time she was in many ways a forerunner of today's sexual freedom and woman's liberation movements, she contained all the same contradictions.

Convinced that the two greatest evils on earth were that the world is full of unwanted children and that married lovers were mostly ignorant of even the rudiments of good lovemaking, she launched a campaign to correct both.

Seeing that the ruling class kept the working class in deliberate sexual ignorance and whilst still a virgin at 34 (due to an unconsummated mar(BBC 1 June 25)

Anthony Bate as Dr Halliday Sutherland riage) she published book of technique Love' (1914 launched a clinic She also to give contraceptive advice to the poor and advocated the cervical cap method as the most advanced and least in trusive technique available.

Closely related to improvements in rubber technology, this method had been in use since 1881, but until the first World War only for upperand middle-class women.

The Catholic Church was implacably hostile to it; Pope Pius XI describing the method as 'shameful and immoral'.

The attempt to destroy Stopes also had considerable medical backing, and it was the opinion of one woman gynaecologist, Professor Louise Mcllroy, that the method was 'the most harmful of which I've had experience'— an opinion based on literally no evidence.

This view was, however, enshrined in a book 'Birth Control', by Dr Halliday D. Sutherland, another Catholic, in which he attempted to mask his reactionary attack by alleging that Stopes was in fact doing unethical experiments on the poor whose natural "instincts' were against birth control anyway!

In the ensuing libel case (1923), which she lost finally in an appeal to the Lords, certain features of the two sides became very clear. • Sutherland, for example, attacked Stopes on the grounds that she was not medically qualified and that her doctorate in philosophy was from Munich and that German philosophy was associated with materialism !

Stability

She explained, however, that her whole campaign, far from being anti-religious, was the direct result of personal divine guidance.

The underlying purpose of her books and clinics, she said, was to further the stability of the family and thus the stability of the country upon which it depended.

Married to a wealthy member of the Avro family, she THE RELEASE of Soviet bioAlathea Charlton as Marie Stopes pressed on with her campaign. One travelling clinic was burnt by Catholics in Bradford, many were stoned. Once she wrote an exposé of Catholic birthcontrol methods and left it chained to the fount in Westminster Cathedral. She made films, she lectured, she organized and hectored. : But other women doctors were taking up the cause and increasingly working - class women themselves were struggling for the meagre benefits available.

Since the First World War, when millions of women had been dragged into armaments production and into the beginnings of organization, working-class girls had been thrust more and more into the political struggle.

Stopes was rapidly overtaken by the forces on which she had ridden.

She turned instead to poetry and lived in grand illusions of her literary merits. She reverted, in fact, to who she was—a rich, eccentric religious reformer.

Nothing was much changed; every step of the way was to be won in political class fights and even today contraception is "not freely" available" on a national "scale.

The show which covered some of these events was very characteristic BBC science programme.

It was slightly souped-up with a touch of the technique SO belatedly fashionable in television circles, the dramatized-documentary, but in a form so debased as to render it harmless.

The writer, R. W. Reid (who is also head of science programmes) did a tedious job and was careful not to tackle any of the real issues involved or to link it it with contemporary society.

Under the guise of frankness about Marie Stopes' life, he masked all the major questions of the • period in which she lived and the real role she played.

Anchor man

Like his films on Einstein and on the building of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the programme had that special veneer of revelation, but it never once left the straight, narrow-and dead-end-liberal path.

(We should remember that for many years R. W. Reid was editor of the BBC-2 series 'Horizon'. His anchor man was the Tory now in charge of broadcasting in the government, Christopher Chataway.)

In whatever guise it comes, religion, like reformism, 1s a divisive, depressive, weakening In this period of Christian gentlemen emerging, particurememberpol that osy oth worth years after the Stopes trial a Tennessee schoolteacher, J. T. Scopes, was arraigned teaching evolution in school and in some southern states today it is still 'unlawful for teacher in any of the public schools of the state to teach any theory that denies the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible'.

Roman, fundamentalist, Anglican. or Greek Orthodox, religion continues to enslave and to underpin the repression of the bourgeois class and its state.

This programme was transmitted on the same day as the reports that the current Pope wants to change the image of the church.

It should not only be poor (!) but should appear to be poor, he said.

He had nothing further to add on birth control for the millions in Ireland and Spain, Italy and S America.

And as for the burning question of whether priests should be allowed to marry, we can only quote the view of one learned scholar.

I think they should be allowed to marry-as long as they're really fond of each other !' Dr. Viktor Morozov, a psychiatrist who had examined Medvedev, assured the scientists that 'he would have been released already if there hadn't been so much noise about the case'.

Those demanding his release included Andrei Sakharov, eminent H-bomb scientist, and the physicist Igor Tamm, a Nobél prizewinner.

'Not one honest and principled scientist, they stated, 'will be sure of his own security if similar grounds can bring about his own repression ..!

At the same time, a long letter addréssed to the Soviet government by Medvedev's twin brother Roy was circulated, detailing the illegal manner of his brother's arrest and accusing the authorities of trying to provoke Zhores 'into a state of mental imbalance which could then be used to justify his hospitalizaMedvedev was released, without a job and-according to his release papers - suffering from "pathological psychopathy'.

Grigorenko and many other Soviet oppositionists still remain in mental homes and prisons.

Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet novelist, who spoke out in defence of Medvedev and condemned 'the incarceration of free-thinking, healthy people in madhouses' as 'spiritual murder', is now himself in danger.

Soviet diplomats have been sounding vut several 'neutral' European governments as to whether they would accept him as a permanent resident.

The bureaucracy cannot hold back the tide with these measures, try as it will in the period ahead.