First Birth Control Clinic


First Birth Control Clinic

The UK's first birth control clinic was opened here in 1925.

Location: 108 Whitfield Street, Bloomsbury

Description: Dr Marie Stopes was born in 1880 in Edinburgh, and although a family planning pioneer, she was heavily criticised for not being a medical doctor. She opened her first family planning clinic in Holloway in 1921 before establishing it here surrounded by social deprivation four years later with her husband.

They set out to prove that a small team in simple, clean surroundings could provide family planning services to poor women. Today the organisation still exists under the cloud of daily protests from anti-abortionists.

Marie Stopes also pioneered the concept of mobile outreach, taking a horse-drawn caravan into the communities she was trying to reach. She was unafraid of criticism and remarkably wrote Married Love - the UK's first sex manual, at a time when the public had access to very limited information about sex.

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First Birth Control Clinic

The UK's first birth control clinic was opened here in 1925.

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