Why did Sweden sterilize more than 60,000 people against their will?

Sweden set up a eugenics plan, based on the science of racial biology, between 1934 and 1976 under which it sterilized up to 63,000 mostly women, believing it was creating a society that would be the envy of the world.

The Nazi-style program approved by the state aimed to rid Swedish society of “inferior” racial types believing that in this way it was helping to build a progressive, enlightened welfare state.

Most victims were people with learning difficulties, poor or those considered not to have pure Nordic blood.

“They wanted to get rid of a certain type of people: The weaker ones,” said 71-year-old filmmaker Kjell Sundstedt.

When he discovered his aunt and four uncles had been forcibly sterilized, he was in absolute shock.

It was a secret no one dared to talk about “as society was ashamed that people had been forced to be sterilized in Sweden,” Sundstedt told Anadolu.

Most of the signs of 40 years of forced sterilization have disappeared from school and history books, he said.

In the eyes of Swedish authorities, his aunt and uncles were “misfits” in a forward-looking nation, and for that, they paid a terrible price: “sterilization” at the hands of the state.

Their only crime “was that they were poor,” he said.

Sundstedt’s mother managed to escape to the Swedish capital, however, her sister, Maj-Britt “sadly” could not save herself from being sterilized.

When Maj-Britt’s mother died, she and her four brothers were asked to undergo an IQ test and as a result, they were taken by social services and placed into “re-education” centers where they faced abuse, including rape.

They were forced into sterilization at a very young age.

“Intelligence was very important” for authorities, said Sundstedt, adding that his aunt and uncles were classified as “idiots” after failing an IQ test.

Maj-Britt kept protesting and was eventually sent to a mental asylum.

Victims were regularly taken into those sorts of institutions and sterilized without their consent, for eugenics, social or medical reasons.

​​​​​​​’Not ashamed, others should be’

One case was Maria Nordin, 72, who had been forced to undergo sterilization after she was deemed mentally ill as a child because she did not have glasses and could not read from the blackboard. “I am not ashamed, others should be,” she told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Nordin was forced into a school for the mentally subnormal and at 17, during World War II, was made to sign sterilization documents.

“I signed because I knew I had to get out … I was sent to Bollnas hospital where they took everything out. A doctor Ingvarsson said to me: ‘You’re not very bright, you can’t have children,'” she said.

Sundstedt’s grandfather tried to prevent his children from being sterilized, “but it didn’t help,” he said.

He said to get released, victims were forced into signing a document authorizing the sterilization procedure or risk losing any children they had and all benefits.

The Swedish government also believed that society would be improved by sterilizing couples deemed to be inferior parents and their teen children to break the cycle of misbehavior, recalled Sundstedt.

Politicians defended the program in a bid to keep costs down in an emerging welfare state, believing it was sterilizing those who typically turn to the state for help because, according to them, the welfare state was only “for people who behaved themselves,” said Sundstedt.

Sweden inspired Nazi Germany

The sterilization law was introduced after years of research in eugenics and genetics conducted by the State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala in the early 20th century.

Founded in 1922, the institute inspired the creation of a similar institute in Germany in 1927.

“German philosophers and German scientists came to Uppsala and took everything from this race Institute to Germany and started the race biological Institute in Berlin, which led to the establishment of Nazism and so on,” said Masoud Kamali, an author and a world-leading professor of sociology and social work.

He told Anadolu that the sterilization ideology was partially based on race and racist ideology, but also on the ideology of modernity and enlightenment — a belief funded by the idea that the government should reform and remake their citizens.

The ideology, which was very widespread in Swedish society, believed that “those citizens who are not really desirable, should be excluded,” said Kamali, who is also a former politician who was employed by the government as a Special Investigator in the question of integration.

The racial institute and sterilization law was backed by all Swedish parties, except the Communists, according to the professor.

The Nazi Germany is known to have sterilized 400,000 Germans, while neighboring Norway is believed to have sterilized 40,000 people and Denmark 6,000, according to the Guardian newspaper.

Thirty US states and Canada also practiced sterilization until long after the war. North Carolina sterilized 7,700 people alone, two-thirds of them being black, according to the newspaper.

Abolished in 1976

The state-run sterilization program in Sweden was carried out publicly under massive propaganda and little criticism but eventually was abolished in 1976 after growing opposition from victims and women’s movements during the 1960s.

Following a parliamentary inquiry in the 1990s, the Swedish government compensated 3,000 victims of forced sterilization — a very low number compared to the suspected figure of those who were forcibly sterilized.

In 1997, a former Social Affairs Minister Margot Wallstrom, told the media: “What happened was nothing but barbaric.”

Wallstrom admitted to feeling ashamed that she originally rejected to compensate victims for damages in 1996 due to sterilizations being written in Swedish law.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in its 2011 report confirmed that “Sweden’s eugenic sterilisation laws created over 60,000 victims.”

While a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Radhika Coomaraswamy, labeled sterilization a human rights violation, according to the Parliamentary Assembly.

“A severe violation of women’s reproductive rights, forced sterilization is a method of medical control of a woman’s fertility without the consent of a woman. Essentially involving the battery of a woman – violating her physical integrity and security – forced sterilization constitutes violence against women,” said Coomaraswamy.

NATO could welcome its 32nd member in the next few days: after a long delay, the Hungarian parliament wants to vote on Sweden’s application for membership – and the signs point to approval.