Author, Suffragist. She was born Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes to a well-to-do archaeologist Henry Stopes and his wife, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, who was Shakespearean scholar and a suffragist. Her studies of paleobiology took her to universities in London, England and Munich, Germany, then returning to England, she became the first female member of the science faculty at the University of Manchester. Traveling around the world to study fossil ferns in coal, Dr. Stopes became noted for her work with published articles in paleabiology. In 1911, she married Reginald Ruggles Gates, a noted Canadian geneticist. Their relationship quickly failed when she realized that her husband was impotent. The marriage was not consummated, thus annulled in 1914 with Gates being shamed publicly. This ordeal changed her life’s focus, led to her studying a new subject and the publishing of her book “Marriage Love” in 1918. The book sold 75,000 copies even though it was condemned by churches, the medical establishment and the press; she put in print the “unmentioned subject”. With women writing her for more advice, a second book, “Wise Parenthood” was published. In 1921, she opened the first English family planning clinic at Holloway in north London. The clinic offered free birth control while she collected data from the clients about the results. Within twenty years, other clinics opened throughout England. She sued a disagreeing Catholic physician for slander but lost the case, then won it only to have a higher court overturn the win; these trials gave her cause much publicity and sides were taken by the public. She married Humphrey Verdon Roe, a rich philanthropist, businessman, World War I flying ace and later a veteran of World War II; he was very supportive of her views on birth control. After a stillborn and her near mental break in 1919, they produced a son in 1924. Since she had reached the age of mid-forties, the couple adopted, over ten-year span, four sons with each staying in the home for only a short period as “none measured up to her standards due to their poor breeding”; she made a point to only accept boys of the Christian background. A divorce resolved her second marriage in 1935. Throughout her life, she continued to campaign for women to have better access to birth control, but spent most of the last decades of her life writing plays and poetry; some were too erotic to be published. She believed in making a perfect race by eugenic birth control; “only the best and the beautiful should survive”; she promoted sterilizing women who were “slow mentally”. Her thinking was very similar to Adolph Hilter’s in regards to those of the Jewish faith. She was strongly against the termination of a pregnancy; during her lifetime her clinics did not offer abortions. Today, the women’s health care organization called the “Marie Stopes International: Children by Choice, not Chance” provides poor women in 37 countries around the world the choice of an abortion as a form of birth control. Marie Stopes was one of the most influential women of the 20th century: a distinguished fossil expert, brilliant academic and pioneer of birth control for women.