https://www.independentliving.org/docs5/sterilization.htmlEradication of "deviants": the dark side of the Swedish Model." | Independent Living Institute
The world was shocked by the recent news of a skeleton in Sweden’s closet, the country’s forced sterilization policy of disabled people and others who were not found to be worthy to have children. The facts are clear, there is no reason to question the authencity of the sterilization records. Sources other than Dagens Nyheter, the nation’s largest daily newspaper that recently started the sterilization discussion, as well as researchers are confirming the facts. Also, Sweden is famous for its comprehensive statistics. Thus, all sterilizations records and "patient" journals are archived and available to researcchers and journalists. Persons who were sterilized against their will have come out of their silence and appeared in the media. The sterilizations were fully legal according to the laws of the time. There were well-developed and state-regulated routines with medical experts at the local and national level, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, with a panel of highly placed representatives of political parties (mainly female Social Democrats including an ambassador to the United Nations) who signed the decisions that would deprive tens of thousands of persons of one of the most basic human rights, the right to have children.
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/40871Project MUSE - Eugenics and the Welfare State
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise-up-to-30000-people-against-their-will-in-the-cause-of-eugenicsWhy did Sweden sterilise up to 30,000 people against their will in the cause of eugenics? | Euronews
Sweden set up a eugenics plan, grounded in the science of racial biology, between 1934 and 1976. “They wanted to get rid of a certain type of people: The weaker ones”.
Kjell Sundstedt’s family had never talked about the darkest moment in their history.
“It was a secret no one dared to talk about. Society was ashamed that people had been forced to be sterilised in Sweden”, says the 71-year-old filmmaker.
He had not even discussed it with his family, so when Sundstedt discovered that four of his uncles had been forcibly sterilised he was shocked.
“They were sterilised because they were poor. Their crime was poverty”, he adds.
Sweden set up a eugenics plan, grounded in the science of racial biology, between 1934 and 1976. The first country in Europe to later abolish forced sterilisation was carrying out a policy under which between 20,000 and 33,000 Swedes were forced to be sterilised.
Victims were young and mostly female, judged to be ‘feeble-minded’, ‘rebellious’ or ‘mixed race’. Swedish authorities believed they were creating a society that would be the envy of the world.
“They wanted to get rid of a certain type of people: The weaker ones”, says Sundstedt.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/mar/06/stephenbatesSweden pays for grim past | World news | The Guardian
Up to 63,000 people, mostly women, were sterilised under a racial purity programme approved by the state until 1976. After years of evasion, Stockholm is finally offering the victims compensation
By Stephen Bates
Sat 6 Mar 1999 04.04 CET
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After years of denial, Sweden began moves yesterday to compensate thousands of citizens sterilised in a grim social experiment in eugenics which lasted more than 40 years.
Stockholm's social affairs ministry announced it would pay up to £13,430 to each surviving victim of the 1934-76 programme.
The decision follows the report in January of an official commission set up in the wake of newspaper reports in 1997 that up to 63,000 people - 90 per cent of them women - were sterilised with state approval to improve Swedish "racial purity" as part of a policy of "ethnic hygiene". The commission has received up to 200 calls a month from victims.
Its secretary, Leif Persson, said: "They say they have been haunted by this their whole lives and that it has been a real source of shame for them."
Teenagers as young as 15 were sterilised, some without their parents' consent, for inadequacies as trivial as shortsightedness or because they allegedly lacked judgment or had "no obvious concept of ethics".
Pressure was put on orphans and children in special schools and reformatories to have the operation as a condition of release.
Pregnant women seeking abortions because their foetus was damaged were told they also had to consent to sterilisation. People could even apply to have problem neighbourhood families sterilised.
Maija Runcis, who studied several thousand sterilisation cases as part of a doctoral thesis, said: "Nowadays people are appalled, but then nobody cared about these people. This was a backyard to the nice little Swedish home. Everyone always talked about the Swedish model, how nice it is here. But no one talked about things like this."
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA435359585&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=08232105&sw=w&u=loyoland_main&p=AONE&aty=ipEugenics and racial biology in Sweden and the USSR: contacts across the Baltic Sea - Document - Gale Academic OneFile
In early 20th-century Europe, nationalist myths of glorious battles and heroic pasts were increasingly accompanied by claims to primordial pedigrees, evoked to consolidate new "imagined communities." (2) As a Swedish society for Racial Hygiene was founded in 1909 it followed a larger European pattern. (3) But Sweden's prominence within the international eugenics movement started when the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, in 1921 established the State Institute for Racial Biology (Statens institut for rasbiologi, SIFR) in Uppsala, the world's first government institute of eugenic research. Under the leadership of its director, Herman Lundborg (1868-1943), SIFR became a source of inspiration and a liaison between eugenicists around the world, and served as a model for the German Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fur Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik. (4) Among SIFR's more notable associates was Hans F. K. Gunther (1891-1968), known as Rassen-Gunther, the future Nazi ideologue on racial matters, who spent the years 1923-1929 in Sweden and Norway. (5) Over the past two decades, the activities of SIFR have been well documented in a number of studies, not least its significant contacts with eugenicists in Germany, Britain, the United States, and the other Nordic countries. (6) SIFR's Soviet connections are, in comparison, much less known. Yet, for over a decade, Herman Lundborg was involved in a significant intellectual exchange with his Soviet colleagues Iurii Filipchenko (1882-1930) and Valerii Bunak (1891-1979).
By examining this previously unstudied and almost completely forgotten relationship, this article casts light on the complex and contradictory co-operation between Swedish and Soviet racial biologists in the 1920s and its paradoxical afterlife. Condemned under Stalin but partially rehabilitated after 1956, Lundborg was cited as an authority by Soviet raciologists well into the 1970s, long after his ideas had fallen out of fashion and become highly controversial, if not outright rejected, in Sweden. Particular attention is given the enduring popularity in Soviet science of the concept of race. This article traces this set of co-operative relations before and after the Stalinist era to explore the interplay of eugenic ideas across political ideologies. It employs the term "eugenics" to describe an organized intellectual movement, rather than a specific scientific understanding or application. For instance, Lamarckian eugenics, which yielded some influence under Stalin, falls outside the frames of this study.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/03/euge-19m.htmlSocial Democrats implemented measures to forcibly sterilise 62,000 people - World Socialist Web Site
Sweden continued eugenics policy until 1976
Social Democrats implemented measures to forcibly sterilise 62,000 people
Steve James
19 March 1999
For over 40 years, young socially marginalised working class women in Sweden faced the danger of forced sterilisation. This was carried out under laws intended to purify the Swedish race, prevent the mentally ill from reproducing and stamp out social activities classed as deviant. The last sterilisation took place in 1975.
Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for "crimes" such as going to dance halls. One woman was sterilised in 1960 for being in a motorcycle gang. Orphans were sterilised as a condition of their release from children's homes. Others were pinpointed on the basis of local neighbourhood gossip and personal grudges. Some were targeted because of their "low intelligence", being of mixed race, being gypsies, or for physical defects.
The issue has assumed the character of a national scandal, although similar revelations have emerged in other countries including neighbouring Norway, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Belgium and the United States. Per head of population, however, only Nazi Germany sterilised more people than Sweden. How could such a programme be sustained in a country famed during the post-war epoch for its apparently enlightened social policy?
The Swedish Institute for Racial Biology was opened in Stockholm in the early 1920s. It emerged as part of a worldwide interest in eugenics–the notion that human stock could be improved by selective breeding, much like cattle. From the start, the Swedish institute was fascinated with the notions of racial purity, which were to be made notorious by the Nazis. The Swedish institute invited German speakers on Aryanism.
The Sterilisation Act was passed in 1935, under the government of the Swedish social democratic party (SAP). The Act shortly preceded the founding of the so-called "Swedish model" of welfare capitalism, based on a vision of national unity between large corporations and workers. The concept of the "people's home" (folkhemmet) accompanied a close corporatist relationship between the Swedish employers' federation and the major trade union federations. This was promoted by the trade unions, and the SAP, as an alternative to the bitter class struggles that had raged across Scandinavia since the turn of the century, and as a barrier to social revolution.
The relationship was formulated in the town of Saltzjoben, and the "spirit of Saltzjoben" was invoked on many occasions to anoint new agreements between the trade unions and big business. Yet, in the basement of the "people's home", social policies promoted by the Nazis were maintained by the social democrats. The Sterilisation Act was directed against the most oppressed and vulnerable, those without any legal or political voice. In the 1930s and 40s the victims were also those who simply failed to fit the racist stereotype deemed acceptable in order to ensure full membership in Swedish society.
Files recently released from the Swedish National Archives make clear that from the 1950s, after the Institute for Racial Biology was wound up, sterilisation continued based on an agenda to promote social conformity. Those targeted were misfits and rebellious young people. The young woman who hung around with a motorcycle gang was described as being "without good judgement", with "no concept of ethics". Her doctors were, in addition, sure she was sexually active, and so she was sterilised.
People deemed likely to burden the state with the cost of child allowance payments were also targeted. When the new benefit was introduced in the 1950s, the rate of sterilisations doubled. In some cases, sterilisation was also made a condition of obtaining an abortion.
In 1997, the Irish Times, quoting the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, reported on the work of Maija Runcis, a doctoral student who spent eight years researching 5,000 case files. The files brought out the horrible detail of a process reminiscent of a witch trial.
"Each file starts with a form applying for permission to have the person sterilised. This could come from a relative, social worker, teacher, politician or even a neighbour. 'These people would have the application forms in their possession, fill them in and send them to the Medical Board,' said Ms Runcis. There would also be a doctor's report and often results of intelligence tests. 'They would ask questions like: name the King of Sweden, what is the population of some city and where in the country is another city? They were ridiculous questions. I can't answer some of them.' The medical board, in Stockholm, would assess the applications. A single official, invariably a man, would finally sanction the operation. 'They made about 20 decisions a day.' The most disturbing cases Ms Runcis found were those of the teenagers, some as young as 15, who accepted sterilisations in return for a release from a children's home or special school. 'It was a form of blackmail and these people didn't have any choice,' she says."
The Swedish press took up Ms Runcis's reports and the government was forced to concede a commission of inquiry. Since its inception in 1997 the commission has received 200 calls a month from victims of the state sterilisation programme.
The commission reported in January this year and recommended that victims should be financially compensated. Earlier this month the Swedish Social Affairs Department, run by the same party that introduced the 1935 act, announced that victims would be offered a miserly $21,000, if they had not "consented" to the sterilisation operation, and if they themselves applied for compensation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324615205_Legalised_non-consensual_sterilisation_-_eugenics_put_into_practice_before_1945_and_the_aftermath_Part_2_Europe(PDF) Legalised non-consensual sterilisation – eugenics put into practice before 1945, and the aftermath. Part 2: Europe
7. Sweden
Swedish laws, enacted in 1934 and in 1941, permitted 'legally incapable' people to be sterilised. The three indications were: eugenic, social and medical. There was no requirement for consent from the individual concerned, no Board and no court hearing. In the 1940s, such compulsory sterilisations were done on so-called ‘inferior’ members of society considered feebleminded or otherwise unfit. This policy, in force between 1935 and 1975, had been endorsed by all Swedish parties except the Communist Party, which consistently opposed it. The law aimed at stopping the spread of hereditary disease and at preventing people, considered unfit to become parents, from procreating. Ostracism and covert racism were determinants of the measures taken against vagrants, but people with other ‘deviant’ behaviours were sterilised as well: Roma, prisoners, people with ID, and women who had sought to terminate their pregnancies. The law was amended in 1976 to require freely given consent for sterilisation; since then, the principle of free will has been so rigorously applied that sterilisation of the ‘legally incapable’ is no longer allowed [25]. There were 62,888 sterilisations between 1935 and 1975, with a peak at 2,351 in 1949; these numbers
are high for a country of 7 million inhabitants at the time. From the 1950s onwards, sterilisations were linked with abortions: the latter were authorised only if a sterilisation was agreed to.
>This policy, in force between 1935 and 1975, had been endorsed by all Swedish parties except the Communist Party, which consistently opposed it.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324615205_Legalised_non-consensual_sterilisation_-_eugenics_put_into_practice_before_1945_and_the_aftermath_Part_2_Europe(PDF) Legalised non-consensual sterilisation – eugenics put into practice before 1945, and the aftermath. Part 2: Europe
In the UK, the Labour Party, possibly on its own, succeeded in preventing the approval of a sterilisation law by Parliament, in the mid-1930s.
In Sweden, the Communist Party was the only political group that persistently opposed the sterilisation law in force between 1935 and 1975.