Compulsory sterilisation in Sweden

[5] The stated rationale behind the legislation was to prevent sterilisation from becoming a contraceptive method in the hands of the individual.

[9] In 1997, on behalf of the Swedish government, the ethnologists Mikael Eivergård and Lars-Eric Jönsson made an attempt at estimating what percentage of sterilisations were coerced.

They found that a quarter of the applications were made under circumstances similar to coercion such as a condition for release from an institution and that another 9 percent were signed under pressure.

Tydén uses these percentages to make an estimate of the number of operations under coercion.

[11] From the 2000s, the Swedish state paid out damages to victims who filed for compensation.

Sources. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Chart showing the number of sterilisations reported to the central authority, the National Swedish Board of Health or the National Board of Health and Welfare , between 1935 and 1979 and the various indications for operations performed between 1941 and 1975. In order to keep a lid on sterilisations, [ 3 ] eugenicists arranged to collect detailed information. As a consequence, Swedish data is complete when it comes to legal operations since 1941. An unknown number of men were sterilised abroad or illegally in Sweden. This may have been the cause of the lower number of operations during the early 1970s. [ 4 ] When, from January 1976, permission was no longer needed, the number of sterilisations grew considerably.