Sir, - The front page of your issue of April 7th mentions medical experiments carried out in Sweden, including "the Social Democratic government's forced sterilisation programme during 1935 and 1936, when 60,000 people were sterilised to `weed out inferiors'." Wrong. 250 people were sterilised in 1935 and 293 in 1936. What the writer is trying to say is that 62,888 people were sterilised between 1935 and 1975 - but they were neither all "forcibly" sterilised nor all sterilised in order to "weed out inferiors".
The lack of any attempt to put Sweden's position into perspective also veers towards the tabloid. The first place to introduce laws on eugenic sterilisation was Indiana in 1907. By the mid1930s over 20 US states had laws permitting forcible sterilisation. So had Canada, Switzerland, Iceland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Latvia, Litany, Hungary, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Turkey, Mexico and Cuba. I omit Nazi Germany because everybody is aware of the Nazis' enthusiasm for eugenics - which is exactly why the fact that forcible sterilisation was not limited to "Social Democratic" Sweden and Nazi Germany should have been pointed out.
The very use of the term "Social Democratic government" instead of "Swedish government" is loaded. There was nothing unusual about Sweden having a Social Democrat government in 1935-6. Sweden has been governed as often by the Social Democrats as has Ireland by Fianna Fail, so why mention the Social Democrats? On page 11 of the same issue, a court case involving the Danish Prime Minister is reported without any mention of his party. The article on Sweden smacks of the current "end of history" philosophy - only free-market societies are normal and democratic. The Swedish Social Democrats believed that small people needed a strong state to protect them from the excesses of big capital, and aspired to turning Sweden into Folkhemmet, the people's home. Sweden was a fully functional parliamentary democracy throughout this period; but the "end of history" theory is apparently so all-pervasive that such ideas automatically conjure up notions of totalitarianism. Swedish Social Democracy just has to be similar to National Socialism or Soviet Socialism. Yet similar things happened in "normal" societies.
It was an American eugenicist who argued in July 1933, when the Nazis introduced their sterilisation laws, that "the Germans are beating us at our own game". Despite a reference in the article to One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, there was no mention of the fact that the Americans also undertook involuntary medical experimentation - including deliberately leaving syphilis untreated. Sweden repealed its sterilisation laws over 20 years ago; today in certain southern US states unmarried women who have children are denied welfare unless they agree to chemical sterilisation. The US is the land of freedom of choice and this sterilisation is not forcible. These women have freedom of choice: sterilisation or starvation.
This article was silly and certainly should never have appeared on the front page of The Irish Times which is, notwithstanding the above, the only paper worth reading. - Yours, etc.,
Sean Swan
Walnut Grove, Wexford.