Sweden practiced eugenics until 1976, forcibly sterilizing 62,000 people.

Did you know that Sweden practiced eugenics until 1976, forcibly sterilizing 62,000 people.

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.

 

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Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for “crimes” such as going to dance halls.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.

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Sweden practiced eugenics until 1976, forcibly sterilizing 62,000 people.