Alice Hancock

speaker

191 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Alice Hancock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Science Show · How bird brains help us understand human brains, and how eugenics had as much hand in the birth control movement as did feminism · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

Are we going to have a white Australia?

Not merely white in skin, but white at heart.

A really good, clean Australia?

Yeah.

Anyway, the Racial Hygiene Association opened its first birth control clinic in 1933.

So how much of this work was a commitment to women's issues versus curbing the reproduction of people they considered to be unfit to reproduce?

Around this time, the Racial Hygiene Association introduced a marriage advisory centre, which offered premarital counselling to see if two people who were thinking of getting married were fit to reproduce.

But then came World War II and the Holocaust.

Eugenic policies were used to justify the involuntary sterilisation and mass murder of so-called undesirable populations.

And while the explicit discourse of eugenics did mostly fall out of favour after World War II, it didn't disappear.

How should advocates of the birth control movement today address the problematic aspects of the history and the organisations involved?

Birth control's eugenics history is uncomfortable, no doubt, but not addressing it runs the very real risk it can be distorted and used to strip away reproductive rights even today.

For instance, in 2022, arguments linking abortion to eugenics featured in debates surrounding the overturning of Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion in the US.

The thing is, Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes and Ruby Rich and those like them were all massively anti-abortion.

A hundred years ago, abortions were incredibly dangerous, and these women thought birth control could limit the number of abortions that needed to happen.

Here's Jane Carey again.

There's been a lot of discussion of this history within reproductive rights organisations across the West over the last kind of five, six years, particularly starting in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement.

So in response to that, several organisations have changed their names.

Such as Marie Stopes International, which began as the Mother's Clinic for Constructive Birth Control in London, founded by Stopes as the UK's first birth control clinic.

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