The deal was simple. She was a 23-year-old single mother of two children in Sweden during the early 1950s. Hindered by a battle with alcoholism, she struggled to care for her children. Now, she had fallen pregnant for a third time. She was too young and too busy. Without the resources and stability to take care of another child at that moment, she wanted an abortion. But, at the behest of the Swedish state, her request would only be granted if she agreed to a condition: irreversible sterilization.
This is not a story of violated due process or a legal misunderstanding. Rather, this is how the well-oiled mechanism of state-mandated sterilization functioned in Sweden and the Nordic countries of Norway, Finland, and Denmark for most of the mid-20th century. Swapping the request for an abortion for gender reassignment surgery, the same deal was forced upon transgender individuals in these four countries well into the 21st century—even as recently as last year in the case of Finland. Of all these countries, however, Sweden stands out as the principal proponent of sterilization policies, sterilizing an estimated 63,000 individuals between 1934 and 1976. A prime example of the dangers of welfare state governmental overreach, Sweden’s compulsory sterilization policies reveal a dark undercurrent to the Nordic welfare model’s success, in which national cohesion historically stems from a systematic erasure of undesirable differences.
Sweden’s first sterilization law went into effect in 1934 and its second in 1941. Between the two laws, the state granted itself the ability to sterilize those it considered either likely to give birth to children with disabilities or unfit to raise a child—in other words, those deemed “feeble-minded,” antisocial, mentally ill, or physically disabled. During this same period, Sweden began to develop into a modern welfare state, implementing reforms ranging from universal health insurance to affordable housing programs. Among the reforms was a series of policies focused on raising the birth rate in the wake of World War II. While most of the population celebrated the introduction of maternity aid and childcare benefits, parents who needed this new state support most found themselves tangled up in the strings attached. Many people, primarily women, were told they could only receive certain benefits if they agreed to be sterilized.
The Swedish welfare state openly acknowledged the necessity of removing “undesirable elements” from society to ease policy implementation. During debates in the Swedish Parliament, proponents of the sterilization laws cited the care costs of “mentally defective” individuals as an explicit economic motivator for implementing the legislation. The children of “feeble-minded” parents were deemed likely to become the state’s responsibility, and the cost of expanding social assistance was seen as simply too high if that assistance required accommodating a high proportion of “mentally deficient” individuals. Thus, sterilization aimed to ensure that future generations of Swedish citizens would be composed primarily of only the optimal candidates for state support, or those who—ironically—would need it least.
Government-sponsored sterilization permeated beyond just active requests for state aid or even conditional benefits. IQ tests mandated by child protection services deemed the children of families in poverty to be “feeble-minded,” and their low scores were used to justify sending them to state mental institutions where they would then be sterilized. A 13-year-old girl faced the procedure after her priest believed she had not been concentrating during confirmation class. Another schoolgirl was similarly sterilized for having subnormal intelligence that was, in actuality, a result of her undiagnosed nearsightedness. Sometimes, the state would not even tell the individual what was occurring, pretending the operation was an appendectomy instead, for fear that they would be overly promiscuous if they knew they could no longer get pregnant. In addition to being a blatant human rights violation, this was a state believing in its own right to forcibly impose a moral code of chastity onto its citizens. Consent was utterly irrelevant. Bodies were left mutilated and amputated at the state’s bidding.
After 40 years of implementation, the initial sterilization laws were finally overturned in 1976. Nonetheless, this period of Sweden’s modern history reveals a key danger of its welfare state: The level of reach into the lives of its citizens can easily result in coerced civil rights violations that are sponsored by an unprincipled government. No financial compensation can undo the policy’s success. The generational legacy exists in what is now absent: Unbroken family lines. Instead, the majority of sterilized individuals are destined to be descendant-less.
The repeal of the 1934 and 1941 laws was by no means the end of state-mandated sterilization in Sweden. Four years before 1976, Sweden implemented a new iteration of this eugenics program, requiring sterilization for anyone seeking a sex-change operation. In another ironic coupling of progressive politics with conservative social ideals, Sweden became the first country in Europe to formally allow preferred gender recognition, but, once again, on the condition of either infertility or active sterilization. The social motivations for this stipulation were the same as before. The Swedish government had an idea of what constituted a good parent and believed its duty was to prevent “problem parents” from raising “problem children” and eliminate social disharmony and welfare dependence by any means necessary. When this stipulation was finally repealed in 2012, it was not by the Swedish government’s choice but rather due to a long overdue ruling by the Stockholm Administrative Court of Appeals that the law was unconstitutional and incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Sweden’s trajectory of sterilization laws is not unique. Sterilization programs were in effect in Norway from 1934 to 1977, in Denmark from 1929 to 1967, and in Finland from 1935 to 1970. Likewise, infertility through sterilization was a requirement for preferred gender recognition in all the aforementioned countries until the 2010s, with Finland only changing its policy in 2023 as a result of court intervention rather than legislative repeal. This is one shared story with the same motivations, effects, and common legacy playing out across the majority of Nordic countries over the course of the last century. It is a story that offers the Nordic model a new definition: a model in which the provision of welfare services originates in the intentional refinement of the population to those deemed maximally self-sufficient and socially homogeneous. Through forced sterilization, all of these nations unashamedly curated their own futures in accordance with a uniform idea of morality, maturity, and idealized citizenry. They attempted to condition “undesirable elements” out of existence.