Flashback 1997.
The Economist reports:
The Nazis were not alone in viewing Nordic peoples as the ideal biological “type”. A lot of Nordics, it now seems, immodestly felt the same way. All four main Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden—brought in eugenics laws in the 1930s. More remarkably, some of those laws stayed on the statute books until the mid-1970s, though apparently they were not latterly used very often. It is a subject which most of today's Nordic folk would rather keep in decent obscurity, but a series of articles in an influential Stockholm newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, has been shocking the Swedes to the core and making other Nordics look back nervously at the not-so-recent past.
Between 1935 and 1976, the newspaper says, no fewer than 60,000 young Swedish women deemed mentally defective or otherwise handicapped to a degree “which makes them incapable of looking after their children” were sterilised. More embarrassingly, this happened under laws passed in 1934 by a vigorous new Social Democratic government—a hitherto esteemed forebear of Sweden's present rulers. The laws lapsed only in 1976.
To its many supporters in the 1930s, the policy served three purposes: to prevent the “degeneration of the race”, especially as feeble-minded and insane people were supposed to breed more freely than thrifty and energetic people of “superior” stock; to be kind—yes, that is how it was rationalised—to people who needed “protection” against propagating their own weak genes; and lastly, as the Stockholm newspaper explained, to save the state the heavy cost of welfare for the very dim.
It sure is costly:
Sweden seems to have been pretty zealous, though, in applying its eugenics. The 60,000 Swedish women made sterile compare with about 11,000 Danes who met a similar fate between 1929 and 1967. The Norwegians and Finns have each confessed to 1,000 or so of their women known to have been forcibly put out of breeding circulation.
Death by the Welfare State. How compassionate.
