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Old wine, new bottles: on Marie Stopes, Malthus, and why ‘we must act now’ keeps coming back

Interview with Mark Halliday Sutherland

Lies are Unbekoming | July 7, 2026

Marie Stopes lobbied Parliament to compulsorily sterilise people she called “parasites.” She branded her contraceptives “Prorace” and “Racial.” She bequeathed her clinics not to the Family Planning Association but to the Eugenics Society. She also sits in the BBC viewers’ top 100 Great Britons, appears on Royal Mail postage stamps, and is remembered as the woman who gave British women reproductive choice. Mark Halliday Sutherland’s grandfather was the doctor Stopes sued for libel in 1923 after he accused her of “exposing the poor to experiment.” The trial ran two-and-a-half years across three courts. Dr Halliday Sutherland won.

Behind Stopes stood a longer tradition. Thomas Malthus wrote in 1798 that population would outrun food supply and that poverty was therefore a natural law rather than a consequence of governance. Mark traces the pattern forward from there: through Galton’s eugenics, Stopes’s sterilisation campaigns, H.G. Wells’s “faith to kill,” Margaret Sanger’s plan to corral millions of Americans onto government farms, Paul Ehrlich’s proposal to add sterilants to water supplies, and John Holdren’s “planetary regime.” The same three solutions keep reappearing across a century: more top-down control, restricted births, increased deaths. What changes is the marketing.

Mark grew up believing a simpler version — the one still repeated by the BBC — in which his grandfather was a backward Catholic obstructing a feminist pioneer. In 2013 he found Halliday’s papers in the cellar of his mother’s house. Seven years of research later he published Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it, drawing on primary sources with nearly 700 citations across 320 pages. He is Sydney-based, currently working from London as a coach and facilitator, and writes on Substack about how the ideas that drove Stopes’s clinic never really went away — they just changed clothes.

The interview traces how organisations rename themselves to soften their image (the Eugenics Society is now the Adelphi Genetics Forum; the Voluntary Euthanasia Society is now Dignity in Dying), why the Society’s 1960 decision to pursue “crypto-eugenics” still shapes what gets said and what doesn’t, and what Mark reads in a Canadian paper modelling CAD $1.273 trillion in savings from expanded MAiD. Halliday Sutherland predicted in 1929 that the end of European civilisation might come from “a lack of European children.” A century on, fertility rates across the developed world are collapsing.

With thanks to Mark Halliday Sutherland.

1. You’re an author, researcher, facilitator and coach based in Sydney — but a lot of your work centres on a libel trial in 1920s London involving your own grandfather. How did you end up here, and what was the journey that led you into this material?

The first two parts were intentional: I met an Australian girl in London. I emigrated to Australia and we got married. I work as a freelance facilitator and coach in the field of leadership and management.

The author/researcher parts arose from circumstances.

My grandfather, Dr Halliday Sutherland, died in 1960. I was born six months later and was named in his memory. During his life, Halliday was a well-known doctor, author and public speaker but after his death, his fame faded fast.

If he was remembered at all, it was as the man who had attacked Marie Stopes, the woman who founded Britain’s first birth control clinic. In 1922, Halliday accused her of “exposing the poor to experiment” and (she said) called for her to be jailed. She sued him for libel and they fought a bitter legal battle for two-and-a-half years.

Marie Stopes died in 1958. She was famous in her lifetime and, in some ways, her fame increased after her death. She was the subject of five major biographies and things were named after her: buildings, multi-national organisations and memorial lectures. Blue plaques appeared on the buildings in which she had lived and worked.

In short, Stopes was the secular saint of Britain’s birth control movement and was said to have given British women reproductive choice.

To learn about my grandfather’s legal battle, I went to the biographies of Stopes. These cast him as a backward-looking Roman Catholic who wanted to tie women to the kitchen sink. This was the fellow after whom I had been named, and in the context of growing up in the 1970s and 1980s it was, to be honest, a bit of an embarrassment.

In 2013 I rediscovered Halliday’s papers in the cellar of my mother’s house, and I began researching his life more closely. I found that while the biographies of Stopes had included many true facts about him, they had omitted many other true facts that told a very different story. I learned that in 1920s Britain, Halliday had been at the forefront of the opposition to eugenics.

Back then, eugenics was at its height and had many supporters in the establishment and the intelligentsia. Stopes’ clinic was a eugenic project that sought to transform Britain (and Britons). Her aim was to eliminate the reproduction of people she considered “undesirable” while increasing the numbers of those who were “fit”. Zoe Williams of The Guardian wrote that Stopes’ “… eugenics programme was actually slightly to the right of Hitler’s, just because her definition of defective is so broad.”

Stopes’ biographies and the articles written about her often repeated Sutherland’s libel that she was “Exposing the poor to experiment”, but they always left out the crux of Halliday’s argument: “if children are to be denied to the poor as a privilege of the rich, then it would be very easy to exploit the women of the poorer classes” especially in the lower grades of work. He warned that Britain would become a “servile state” – essentially, a slave state in which poor and working class people had no societal role other than as workers.

As you might imagine, my views changed. For all the talk about the “Roman Catholic doctor” I learned that Halliday’s opposition to eugenics began long before his conversion to Roman Catholicism. It arose from his work as a specialist in Consumption – TB of the lungs – a disease of poverty that killed 50,000 Britons and disabled a further 150,000 each year at that time.

Mainstream eugenicists believed that Consumption was a “racial disease” primarily caused by a person’s heredity. Yes, they knew that germs were involved, but they said that the crucial factor was the narrow lungs inherited from their parentage. Halliday disagreed. Based on his work and research, he said that Consumption was caused primarily by infection and bad living conditions. He said that Consumption could be prevented and, if caught early enough, cured.

It wasn’t merely an academic difference. Karl Pearson, professor of eugenics at London University said the way to eliminate Consumption was to “let nature take its course” and prevent the reproduction of the tuberculous. Sir James Barr was the 1912 president of the British Medical Association who said:

“Until we have some restriction in the marriage of undesirables the elimination of the tubercle bacillus is not worth aiming at. It forms a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit … if to-morrow the tubercle bacillus were non-existent, it would be nothing short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance.”

The link between tuberculosis and Stopes was that, when she opened the Mothers’ Clinic in 1921, it was the restriction that Barr had been hoping for. He wrote a letter of congratulation:

“You and your husband have inaugurated 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.”

He became a vice-president of her Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress (CBC) and testified on her behalf in court.

Having learned these aspects of the story, what was I to do?

To begin with, I contacted historians, biographers and others who wrote articles about Stopes and, when relevant, I told them about my research. Sometimes, I would provide digital copies of unique documents from Halliday’s personal papers. I was always polite – friendly even – hoping that the evidence would start a dialogue and even, down the track, lead to them incorporating my research.

High hopes indeed! I never heard back and only rarely received reply.

I realised that if I didn’t make a permanent record of the true story, such as writing a book, the truth would die with me. That’s when “Exterminating Poverty. The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it” was born. I published it in paperback in August 2020.

Obviously, being a grandson means that people will accuse me of bias. For this reason, I have focused on the words, actions and artefacts of both Stopes and Sutherland from primary sources. “Exterminating Poverty” has almost 700 citations in its 320 pages.

2. You’ve said you grew up believing a false story about your own grandfather — the “Catholics against contraceptives” version. When did you first realise the accepted history was wrong, and what was that moment like?

It wasn’t a single moment rather than many. Initially I felt indignant anger that the story had been falsified and simplified to a “good-guy-versus-bad-guy” trope to favour Stopes.

When I appreciated the size of the project, there were moments of bewilderment and the realisation that if I didn’t finish the book, I would have wasted an enormous amount of time.

There were moments of intense elation when I found key pieces of evidence.

One highlight was spending two days with my brother and co-author in the Wellcome Institute Library in London. Stacks of boxes containing Stopes’ papers, reading what she had written and taking photographs. Frisson and disbelief when I saw evidence that she had interfered with the sworn statements of her witnesses and induced even induced one of them to lie to the court! Followed by a curry and a few beers in the evening. What’s not to like?

Sometimes the construction or the wording of the biographies was odd, or there were significant documents that should have been easy to find but were not. This made me suspicious and I sensed that I should follow that path. It was very rewarding because I found huge gaps in the accounts that had been published.

These days, I feel frustrated at the inertia of the “accepted” history remaining in place despite evidence to the contrary, especially by the BBC which bangs on and on about misinformation and disinformation but which will not amend its accounts of the trial.

3. For readers who’ve never heard of the Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial, what was actually at stake in that courtroom — beyond the surface dispute about contraceptives?

It was about the future of Britain: would contraceptives become commonplace and, if they did, would it be subordinated to eugenic ideology?

The ‘Tenets of the CBC’ and Stopes’ testimony in court clearly expressed the eugenic direction of her work. It was just as much her aim:

“… to secure conception to those married people who are healthy, childless, and desire children, as it is to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood.”

In the early 1920s, Stopes was the preeminent name in birth control and, backed by some of the leading lights of that era, she planned to create a network of clinics across Britain. She had rivals though and was intensely sensitive to criticism. She was itching to sue some of them and Dr Sutherland was chosen because he represented two groups that criticised her: Roman Catholics and the medical doctors.

Had she won the case, she would have silenced her critics and her project would have gained momentum. Because she lost and had costs awarded against her, it slowed her down. It delayed the eugenic aspects of birth control and the agitation for the compulsory sterilisation of defectives. This latter part did not regain momentum until the late 1920s/early 1930s and when a private member’s bill was introduced to Parliament in July 1931, it was defeated.

STERILIZATION. (Hansard, 21 July 1931)

I think that her desire for publicity was the Achilles heel of her strategy. Too much time was spent in the trial of her eminent witnesses testifying what an upright person she was. In addition, Stopes decided to testify in the trial, something that she was not required to do.

That was all very well, but a better approach would have been to put the full weight of the burden of proof on Sutherland: he had to justify that what he had written was true. The approach that Stopes took gave the defence ample opportunity to undermine the veracity of her witnesses.

4. Marie Stopes appears on postage stamps and was voted one of the “Greatest Britons.” You argue this celebration rests on a serious omission. What’s the part of her story that consistently gets left out?

In around 2000, the BBC announced a list of its viewers’ “Greatest Britons” and Stopes was listed in the top 100. The Guardian newspaper urged its readers to “find out why Dr Marie Stopes deserves to be called a Great Briton,” followed by this:

“Women, can you imagine your body being the property of your husband? Being permanently pregnant through ignorance? Then thank Dr Marie Stopes. The lifestyle and personal fulfilment enjoyed by British women today owes more than many realise to this remarkable character.”

In other words, Stopes gave women reproductive freedom. The bit they always leave out is that Stopes campaigned and lobbied for laws to compulsorily sterilise people she considered “undesirable”. Had the laws that Stopes campaigned for been enacted, “reproductive choice” would have been made by a state official.

Another thing is that, while there is greater openness about Stopes’ eugenic beliefs today, academics and biographers present her eugenics as being adjacent to her birth control work rather than central to it. The “Tenets of the CBC” and her brand names for her contraceptives – Prorace and Racial – show that eugenics was central to her work. Indeed, when she died, she bequeathed her clinics not to the Family Planning Association but to the Eugenics Society.

‘The Tenets of the CBC’ [Society for] Constructive Birth Control (CBC) leaflet | Wellcome Collection

5. Why do you think authors and researchers leave it out?

While one thinks of academics and biographers as being free to write what they like, I have formed the opinion that in relation to Stopes they are not. I get the impression that there is a relatively small network and, if you want to be included in it, you must toe the party line. To publicly dissent from what your well-established predecessors have written is a no-no and it will lead to your exclusion.

I formed this opinion when I read an interview with June Rose (author of “Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution”) in The Independent newspaper.

Notebook: The monster and the master race: She altered women’s lives for ever. But a new book reveals that Marie Stopes’s motives were distinctly dubious | The Independent

Here are some excerpts:

What the author reveals about her subject will cause a great deal of controversy, possibly exposing the biographer to ridicule, perhaps even cries of betrayal. ‘I am very apprehensive about the book’s reception,’ she said.

She does not talk easily about herself and is somewhat fearful of being known as the woman who brought Marie Stopes crashing from her pedestal … But Miss Rose has left us with a creature who could never find a place in the saintly calendar.

She said: ‘I hope this book celebrates Marie Stopes’s achievement as a sexual revolutionary. I would be upset if it didn’t. But I recognise there are sections which will alienate people, including feminist friends of mine.’

This surprised me because Rose’s book is well-researched and based on primary sources. Given this firm footing, why was she worried? And as for betrayal, who or what were being betrayed?

One of the things that Rose did was to destroy a foundation myth of Stopes’ story – that she was entirely ignorant about sex prior to and during her first marriage to Reginald Ruggles-Gates in 1911. According to the myth, it was only after the failure of her first marriage that she found out about sex by studying in the British Library.

Fortunately, I am outside that field, so am free of those constraints.

6. Thomas Malthus has been dead for nearly two centuries, yet you call him the prototype for a way of thinking that’s still with us. What did he actually argue, and why did your grandfather call it “a quack remedy for poverty”?

The entirety of Dr Sutherland’s 1922 book “Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians” is a root and branch demolition of Malthusianism, too lengthy to go into here.

More was G.K. Chesterton’s withering attack which Sutherland quoted to great effect:

Artificial birth control is one of the many quack remedies advertised for the cure of poverty, and G. K. Chesterton has given the final answer to the Malthusian assertion that some form of birth control is essential because houses are scarce:

“Consider that simple sentence, and you will see what is the matter with the modern mind. I do not mean the growth of immorality; I mean the genesis of gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two more hats; to find out whose business it is to make hats, and induce him to make hats; to agitate against an absurd delay in delivering hats; to punish anybody who has promised hats and failed to provide hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads are rather more important than hats is dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics. The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would prefer the lives of boys to the mathematical arrangement of hats, — all these things are alike to be ignored. The logic of enlightenment is merciless; and we duly summon the headsman to disguise the deficiencies of the hatter. For it makes very little difference to the logic of the thing, that we are talking of houses and not of hats …. The fundamental fallacy remains the same; that we are beginning at the wrong end, because we have never troubled to consider at what end to begin.”

What Dr Sutherland really hated about Malthusianism was that Malthus:

“… forged a law of nature, namely, that there is always a limited and insufficient supply of the necessities of life in the world. From this false law he argued that, as population increases too rapidly, the newcomers cannot hope to find a sufficiency of good things; that the poverty of the masses is not due to conditions created by man, but to a natural law; and that consequently this law cannot be altered by any change in political institutions.”

7. H.G. Wells wrote in 1901 about “the faith to kill” and a future state that would euthanise the “feeble, ugly, inefficient.” How did a celebrated novelist — and someone widely seen as a progressive thinker — arrive at that?

H.G. Wells was not alone in advocating the killing of the unfit to achieve the perfection of mankind.

In 1900, Dr W. Duncan McKim had advocated “a gentle, painless death; and this should be administered not as a punishment, but as an expression of enlightened pity for the victims—too defective by nature to find true happiness in life—and as a duty toward the community and toward our own offspring.”

Wells’ fellow Fabian, G.B. Shaw said that people should go before a committee once every few years to justify their lives: “If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”

Novelists Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence also advocated the killing of the feeble.

These prejudices were given academic backing. Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche’s “Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living” (“Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens“) was published in 1920 and was later used as the basis for the Nazi party’s T4 Aktion. Apparently, when Binding and Hoche learned this, they expressed surprise saying that it was an academic thought experiment rather than an instruction as to what should be done.

In fact, there was so much talk of killing the feeble that it would have been surprising had it not happened.

Dr Sutherland for one was not surprised. In 1921, his article in the Westminster Gazette referred to “a Super-Eugenist, greatly daring” who would “slay every consumptive in the land tonight”.

In his 1925 book, Birth Control Exposed, he wrote:

“If a wave of madness passed over our country, and this eugenic nightmare came true, we might very well ask what tribunal is to decide as to which of us is unfit. About you who are reading this book, I know nothing whatever, but I have a shrewd suspicion that the neo-malthusians have already decided about me. The point is that when these people discuss sterilization, they picture themselves sitting round a table and ordering other people to be sterilized. In the same way Communists, when they talk about the bloody revolution, always picture themselves knocking other people on the head, and indeed they become very angry when I tell them that the other people will retaliate. And thus do all enemies of freedom.”

In 1933 his short story called “The Perfect Eugenic State” incorporated a poison gas lethal chamber which was used to rid society of its defective elements.

To someone who had his eyes open, it was clear where it was all going. And yet sadly this line of thinking continues today.

Giubilini and Minerva’s “After birth abortion: why should the baby live?” was published by the British Medical Journal on 23 February 2012.

After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? | Journal of Medical Ethics

In it, the authors asserted that “‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” When the article caused controversy, the authors expressed surprise on the grounds that it was an academic paper, not a manifesto.

More recently, Renate Lindeman of Substack’s “Liberty Letter” posted an article about a Canadian study that:

“… explores the potential economic savings from expanding medical assistance in dying, where it is currently a leading cause of death, to include vulnerable groups that cost the government more than they contribute in taxes. These groups include individuals with severe mental health issues, the homeless, drug users, retired elderly, and indigenous communities. Both voluntary and non-voluntary scenarios were analyzed, projecting total savings of up to CAD $1.273 trillion by 2047. With an estimated 2.6 million deaths in the voluntary scenario, mostly among mentally ill and elderly populations, this cost-saving measure raises significant ethical concerns. Financially incentivizing MAiD could shift healthcare priorities away from providing necessary support, potentially devaluing vulnerable lives and fostering a troubling reliance on assisted death as an economic solution. The findings highlight a need for ethical scrutiny of MAiD policy expansion.” [Emphasis added]

No doubt the authors of this papers will express surprise if and when it is used as the basis to “off” Canadian citizens to save money. Plus ca change …

8. You’ve traced how organisations repeatedly rename themselves to soften their image — the Eugenics Society becoming the Galton Institute and then the Adelphi Genetics Forum, the Voluntary Euthanasia Society becoming Dignity in Dying. What does that pattern tell us, and why does it work?

It is all about marketing and making your ideas acceptable. Part of this is to make it appear as if what you are saying is new and important. This is because people are obsessed with novelty, so presenting old ideas won’t work. Further, your ideas have to be repackaged to conform to the mores of contemporary society.

It is a good idea to choose a name that does not clearly state your agenda. Better still, choose one that will make your opponents prima facie look bad. For instance, calling your society “Dying with Dignity” is good because if your opponent says: “I disagree with dying with dignity”, they appear to be callous. “Killing Old People,” not so much.

The stated motivation also plays a role: to advocate eugenics for the purposes of national efficiency and racial purity is now not permitted. Using it in the cause of “science” is, such as the promise to prevent genetic diseases. And there are a number of organisations that will facilitate your zygotes (through IVF) and then test them for personality traits, height, IQ and so on to give you the ideal designer baby. So what is now forbidden to nation states is permitted to families – if they have the money.

9. You’ve highlighted a 1960 decision by the Eugenics Society to pursue its aims through what it called “crypto-eugenics.” That’s a striking phrase. What did they mean by it, and where do you see that approach still operating?

In the aftermath of the Second World War, membership of Britain’s Eugenics Society fell by almost one-half. To address this, it resolved: “the Society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful with the US Eugenics Society.”

Of course, “crypto” means secret, not less obvious, but maybe I am nit-picking.

What it meant is that they were going to continue what they were doing and were going to do it covertly. For instance, it meant that the name of their journal changed from The Eugenics Review to The Journal of Biosocial Science. It took longer for the Society to change its name to the “less-evocative” Galton Institute in 1989, and in 2021 it changed its name to the even less evocative Adelphi Genetics Forum.

Eugenics and population control are controversial. While I don’t think that today’s eugenicists, whether in the Adelphi Genetics Forum or elsewhere, would feel bound by a 1960 resolution, I do think that they are aware that secrecy facilitates a quiet life.

Owing to the essential nature of secrecy, it’s hard to see if it is being applied or not. Occasionally though one gets whiffs of smoke. For instance, on page 296 of “Life Without Birth” (1970) Stanley Johnson wrote about:

“An inter-departmental committee of senior civil servants was set up to advise the government of population matters. It has now operated for over a year, reporting direct to the powerful home affairs committee of the Cabinet, and advises how legislative and administrative acts can be made to further a policy of population stabilization. Its existence has been deliberately kept secret for fear of political repercussions, and not many people either in Whitehall or Westminster are aware it is there at all.”

I don’t know if the committee is still going.

10. Across roughly a century of figures — Galton, Stopes, Wells, Shaw, Sanger, Ehrlich, Holdren — you argue the same three solutions keep reappearing: more top-down control, restricting births, and increasing deaths. Why do you think that particular combination is so persistent?

I think that the solutions are consistent because whether they realise it or not, they draw on the same traditions. At the heart of this is a deep-seated anger at God (the ultimate expression of which is to profess that God does not exist), a deep-seated hatred of humanity, and the hubristic belief that they alone can fix the problems.

While the names you mention are presented as great intellects, their solutions they present don’t arise from some great intellectual feat. In fact, their “solutions” are rather obvious.

As Dr Sutherland put it in 1936:

“When responsible and thoughtful members of society begin to advocate the prevention and destruction of human life by means of contraceptives, abortion, infanticide, sterilisation, and euthanasia, it is an evil omen, and the sign of a civilization whose creative power is spent.”

In his Letter to the 21^st Century, I think Isiaih Berlin was on the money:

“If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter … then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.”

“But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelet is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And, in the end, the passionate idealists forget the omelet and just go on breaking eggs.”

11. You’ve drawn a direct line between earlier euthanasia advocacy and Canada’s MAID programme today. What specifically are you seeing in MAID that connects it to that older tradition?

Both concern killing of humans and changing the law so that it isn’t categorised as murder. The only difference is the way it is marketed.

If you think that Canada’s MAiD program is all about compassion, I suggest you read “Government Economics of Expanding Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying to Vulnerable Populations and the Ethical Implications of Allowing the State to Control Death” by Uzair Jamil and Joshua M Pearce which indicates the direction in which MAiD is going. Hat tip to Renate Lindeman of Substack’s “Liberty Letter” for drawing this to my attention.

Government Economics of Expanding Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying to Vulnerable Populations and the Ethical Implications of Allowing the State to Control Death – Uzair Jamil, Joshua M. Pearce, 2025

12. Paul Ehrlich wrote about adding sterilants to the water supply. Margaret Sanger proposed corralling millions of people onto government farms. These sound almost cartoonishly extreme today — yet they came from mainstream, celebrated figures. How should a reader make sense of that?

I think that Ehrlich’s and Sanger’s solutions were aligned to the mores of their times so were less conspicuous then than they are now. The solutions being advocated today would appear to be cartoonish to people who don’t live within the context of our times.

Things change so fast these days that it doesn’t take long for the context to change and for things that look sensible to become ridiculous and cartoonish.

The reaction to Covid provided a lot of these: hospital staff dancing in TikTok videos, the normalisation of collapsing sportsmen and women, Perspex partitions on school desks and so on.

For me, the idea that cows and, in particular, their farts are a huge problem to the extent that the herds need to be culled. And the W.E.F.’s “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” And to ignore the impact that solar weather has on the earth’s climate and to focus on carbon dioxide. All of these ridiculous and clownish things will be seen for what they are in due course (if they are not perceived that way already).

13. You’ve placed climate change advocacy in the same lineage as Malthusianism and Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. What are the tells that make you see it as a continuation of an older pattern rather than something genuinely new?

It has the same “scarcity” mentality. Our existence on the earth, wonderful to behold and evidence of an Almighty and loving God for some, is in fact a cosmic prank! There are lots of people, but there isn’t enough stuff!

The tradition of Malthusianism and Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth is to predict disasters to frighten people to act. It is also traditional that, when the predicted disasters don’t occur, they don’t apologise or admit that they were wrong.

Human nature hasn’t changed all that much. Many people feel the need to tell other people how to live their lives and even whether to live their lives. When you look at problems at the highest levels, they do appear to be insoluble, but that is sometimes because of the level at which you are looking at the problem makes it insoluble.

To the Malthusians, the problem is always the population. Poverty, war, shortages and famine are always caused by over-population, rather than by defective governance, injustice, incompetence, greed, selfishness and corruption.

14. You write that “many current events are noise that distract us from reading the signal,” and that history helps separate the two. For a reader who wants to start spotting the pattern themselves, what are the practical tells — the things to watch for when someone says “we have to act now”?

The way history is taught is “this is what happened in the past,” in other words, something removed and distant from your life. The reality is that history is the continuation and encapsulation of ideas (in the broadest sense of that word) in the present. Study history in that context.

Get to grips with the fact that no one can know everything about any particular event, so be sceptical of the explanations you are given. It doesn’t mean you reject good explanations, so much as realise that at best, they are only approximations, albeit good ones.

And be sceptical that revolutions happen spontaneously, without leadership, planning, organisation and money. “People were hungry, they needed bread, so they overthrew the king and set up a republic,” – what nonsense!

The “Occupy Wall Street” movement was a real organic movement. It didn’t translate into political change because it lacked leadership, planning, organisation and money. So be skeptical when movements (and leaders) arise from nowhere and are presented as organic and grass-roots.

I think Hudson’s Law is sound. It states that anything that is (1) presented as a global crisis (2) admits only global solutions (3) and suppresses dissent, is definitively a scam.

I think you should be acquainted with the “MINDSPACE” paper produced by the Behavioural Insights unit. You can download a copy at: https://www.bi.team/publications/mindspace/ The Behavioural Insights unit – colloquially known as the “Nudge Unit” – advises governments on the deployment of psychological techniques in implementing their policies. If you are aware of their techniques, you will be better able to see when they are being used against you.

Finally, try to develop discernment. Be patient with yourself when you get it wrong, but do keep going!

15. Your grandfather predicted in 1929 that “the cataclysm which may end the eighth known epoch in civilisation may be a lack of European children.” Nearly a century later, fertility rates are collapsing across the developed world. What do you think he’d want people to take from that?

One sentence: “If our civilisation is to survive we must abandon those ideals that lead to decline.”

This comes from the final paragraphs of Birth Control (1922):

“Our declining birth-rate is a fact of the utmost gravity, and a more serious position has never confronted the British people. Here in the midst of a great nation, at the end of a victorious war, the law of decline is working, and by that law the greatest empires in the world have perished. In comparison with that single fact all other dangers, be they war, of politics, or of disease, are of little moment. Attempts have already been made to avert the consequences by partial endowment of motherhood and by saving infant life. Physiologists are now seeking the endocrinous glands and the vitamins for a substance to assist procreation. ‘Where are my children?’ was the question shouted yesterday from the cinemas. ‘Let us have children, children at any price,’ will be the cry of tomorrow.

“And all these thoughts were once in the mind of Augustus, Emperor of the world from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from Mount Atlas to the Danube and the Rhine. The Catholic Church has never taught that ‘an avalanche of children’ should be brought into the world regardless of consequences. God is not mocked; as men sow, so shall they reap, and against a law of nature both the transient amelioration wrought by philanthropists and the subtle expediences of scientific politicians are alike futile. If our civilisation is to survive we must abandon those ideals that lead to decline. There is only one civilisation immune from decay, and that civilisation endures on the practical eugenics once taught by a united Christendom and now expounded almost solely by the Catholic Church.”

16. What are you working on now, and where can readers follow your work and stay in touch with what comes next?

I have a Substack which is free, and I curate hallidaysutherland.com (I am contactable through these sites).

I have been living in London for the last 18 months, so I am focusing on rebuilding my coaching practice and facilitation work.

I continue to promote “Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it” through speaking engagements and interviews like this one. I hope that one day it will be made into a feature film.

Thank you for the opportunity to tell your readers and subscribers this important story.

July 9, 2026 Posted by aletho | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | BBC, Canada, UK | Comments Off on Old wine, new bottles: on Marie Stopes, Malthus, and why ‘we must act now’ keeps coming back