Cecile Booysen

Cécile Booysen (1895 – 7 April 1937) was a South African doctor, peace activist, and promoter of birth control.

Life Booysen was born in 1895, the daughter of a South African farmer.

In 1935 Booysen founded a voluntary birth control clinic known as the Goswell Women's Welfare Centre in Finsbury, then a poor and overcrowded district of London. She was a member of the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics and the Medical Women's Federation. Booysen was one among a number of prominent women doctors who conducted medical trials to establish the efficacy and safety of contraceptive products. Peace News remembered Booysen as one who "felt the need for rousing her profession to work for the prevention of war as they would for the prevention of an epidemic": She has been described as one “who loved life and hated those who produce pain, superstition, and ugliness,” and her death at little more than forty years of age has deprived the medical profession of a valiant worker for peace.