Harry Verdon Stopes-Roe (27 March 1924 – 11 May 2014) was a British philosopher known mainly for his active role in the humanist movement in Britain and around the world.
Born in London,[1] he was the son of the aircraft manufacturer and philanthropist Humphrey Verdon Roe and the women's rights and family planning pioneer Marie Stopes.
[2] He started his career as a physicist, and received a BSc and MSc in physics from Imperial College, London.
[3] In the 1970s, he was largely responsible for developing the BHA's policy on education, covering both religious and non-religious life stances.
Stopes-Roe invented and popularised the term "life stance", initially in the context of debates over the controversial content of the City of Birmingham's Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education in 1975, which referred to "non-religious stances for living", as did the subsequent British Humanist Association (BHA) booklet "Objective, Fair and Balanced" which he and David Pollock produced later in the same year.