While Sweden has enjoyed a reputation as a country of very open-minded people, it wasn't until today that I learned about a very dark side of this country. Forced sterilizations did not end in Sweden until 1975, this article was brought to my attention by a friend who was in sweden during that time frame and is racially mixed.all i gotta to say for people who still have this opinion .... GO FUCK YOURSELVESSSSS and i am soo glad i aint swedish
Sweden: Sterilization Policy Sparks Debate
BY BIRGITTA ISACSSON
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - A sharp debate has opened here over eugenics policies carried out for decades. Some 63,000 people were sterilized in Sweden between 1935 and 1975 to supposedly combat racial and social inferiority. Most were sterilized against their will, and the overwhelming majority of them were women.
Swedish authorities took the first steps toward a "racial hygiene" policy in 1921, when the State Institute for Race Biology was founded in Uppsala. It was the first institute of this kind in the world and a pattern for Kaiser Wilhelm Institute fur Rassenhygiene in Berlin, Germany. The institute distributed pictures of "racially clean" and "racially mixed" people. The "racially mixed" were gypsies, so-called travelers or tinkers, and others considered social outcasts. In 1934 the Swedish parliament adopted a law authorizing sterilization of the "mentally ill." This legislation was extended in 1941 to allow sterilization to combat "antisocial behavior."
By 1947, the number of sterilizations had grown to more than 2,000 a year, and stayed at that level into the 1950s. Swedish authorities put people in impossible situations, such as taking away their children or denying them abortions if they refused to sign an application for sterilization. Young people in reformatories had to sign as a condition for their release or for leave of absence. The forced sterilization laws were finally abolished in 1975 as one of the victories of the growing women's rights movement.