Sir, - As a Swedophile and a historian I would like to respond to Catherine Cleary's article "Dark Shadow on a Model State" (The Irish Times, August 30th). - an attack on the history of social democratic Sweden. I find her attempt to portray Sweden as a sexist state and to link it, through its former sterilisation laws, with Nazi Germany, dubious. She gives the impression that Sweden's former policy on sterilisation was, until this year, "an ugly secret". False. In 1994 Professor Helene Loowtaught a course in Gothenburg University, "National Socialism, Racism and Fascism", in which this issue was thoroughly explored. In 1991 Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tyden published a book, Oonskade I folkhemmet: rashygien och sterilisering I Sverige ("Undesired in the Folk Home: Racial Hygiene and Sterilisation in Sweden"). Here again this subject is exhaustively investigated. Even earlier, Yvonne Hirdman in Att lagga livet till ratta ("Putting Life in Order") explored this subject; her book was published in 1989.
Ms Cleary points out - correctly - that 90 per cent of those sterilised were women. From 1965 onwards 99 per cent of those sterilised yearly were women. Proof of Swedish sexism? No. "Forced" sterilisation was undertaken for three reasons: "eugenic", "social" and "medical". The eugenic, which Ms Cleary links with Nazi Germany and "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia, and the social, into which category her 17-year-old biker girl would fall, accounted for 17 cases out of 1975's yearly total of 1,028 sterilisations.
The remainder, 1,011, were for medical reasons - cases where pregnancy would endanger a woman's health or life due to physical disability or weakness. Obviously, this category was 100 per cent female.
Yes, the Swedish sterilisation laws had a dark side; but they were also motivated by social concern. Which is more callous: sterilisation; or allowing a mentally disabled woman to bear children which she is incapable of taking care of and who may also be similarly disabled? It is an honest question.
Sweden's answer, mistaken in my opinion, was different to Ireland's - as was Sweden's religion and culture - but to attempt to equate social democratic Sweden with Nazi Germany, or to portray Sweden as either inherently more racist or sexist than other European countries is a grotesque distortion of both motivation and action.
I notice that Ms Cleary referred to the "Teutonic" efficiency with which the Swedes undertook the sterilisation programme. This is an interesting slip of the pen in an anti-racist article. - Yours, etc., SEAN SWAN,
School of History,
University of East Anglia,
Norwich, England.