Sweden Painfully Re-examining Past Sterilization Program

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (August 25, 1997 6:58 p.m. EDT) -- They were found to be "inferior," flawed by mental retardation, bad eyesight or "undesirable" racial characteristics. To prevent this genetic heritage from being passed on, they were sterilized -- sometimes involuntarily.

Sweden had as many as 60,000 of its own citizens sterilized between 1935 and 1976. Adults and children were singled out by doctors, school authorities or other officials and were pressured to consent to the procedures.

This sterilization program bore chilling similarities to Nazi ideas of racial superiority -- and media reports on it now are provoking sober self-examination.

The program stemmed from the pursuit of eugenics, a once-popular movement to improve humanity by controlling genetic factors in reproduction.

Though Sweden's sterilization program was a matter of record, it received little public attention, ignored in schoolbooks and hardly mentioned in reference works. A recent series by the prestigious newspaper "Dagens Nyheter," however, has stirred national debate.

Especially shocking to many Swedes is the fact that the law allowing the sterilizations wasn't overturned until 1976, three decades after the Nazis' human engineering policies collapsed in the rubble of the Third Reich.

The sterilizations targeted a wide range of people: those of mixed race; unmarried mothers with several children; people judged to be habitual criminals; even a boy considered "sexually precocious."

"Grounds for recommending sterilization: unmistakable Gypsy features, psychopathy, vagabond life," reads one document cited by "Dagens Nyheter."

Maria Nordin, 72, told the newspaper she had been sterilized in 1943 because she was regarded as mentally inferior.

"One day, the (school) superintendent said I should come into his room to sign some papers. I understood what this was about so I ran into a toilet and sat there and cried for a long time for myself," she said.

Sweden, with its well-developed welfare state and long-standing progressive stances on social issues, is not accustomed to being on the defensive on ethical issues.

"This is a frightening picture that now is being shown to the Swedish people," Alf Svensson, chairman of the opposition Christian Democratic Party, said in a letter to Prime Minister Goeran Persson.

Social Minister Margot Wallstroem says she is considering whether to compensate people who were forcibly sterilized. That would require overturning current law that says the victims can't get compensation because the sterilizations were lawful when performed.

Nordin applied for compensation last year but her request was turned down by Wallstroem, who now says she feels ashamed over the matter.

"I will take up the matter for discussion with the government. It is the least I can do," the Cabinet minister said.

The "Dagens Nyheter" report has hit Swedes at a time when they were already examining some painful history from World War II. The government, under increasing international pressure, is looking into whether property looted by the Nazis from Jews in other countries ended up in Sweden.

The issue of forced sterilization stands to be even more troublesome, because it was conducted under the ostensibly benign gaze of the Social Democrats -- that party that built Sweden's welfare state and proclaimed it a paragon of enlightened government.

"The Social Democrats are implicated in a collective guilt," said Social Minister Wallstroem, herself a member of the party.

The sterilization programs can be traced to turn-of-the-century enthusiasm for eugenics.

The movement had adherents in many countries, but "Sweden was the first in the world to grant this pseudoscience official recognition," Dagens Nyheter wrote in describing how Sweden established an Institute of Racial Biology in 1921.

Not only did eugenics foresee an improved human race, it also was appealing to Social Democrats, who were beginning to see that Sweden's welfare state would be costly and wanted to limit the number of people who would have to be supported, the newspaper said.

By JIM HEINTZ, The Associated Press