New Left Review I/226, November-December 1997

Tor Wennerberg

Sterilization and Propaganda

Late in August this year, a message was widely broadcast by the international media. Filing their reports out of Stockholm, journalists from around the world presented their readers and viewers with the news that between 1934 and 1976, tens of thousands of people—more than 90 per cent of whom were women—were victims of sterilization policies in the Nordic countries. Supposedly, these repressive policies constituted the hidden side of the construction of the emblematic Scandinavian welfare state.

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