Between 1934 and 1976 sterilization programmes were pursued in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, in each case under the auspices and with the knowledge of Social Democratic governments. In these years some 6,000 Danes, 40,000 Norwegians and 60,000 Swedes (90 percent of them women) were sterilized for ‘hygienic’ purposes: ‘to improve the population’. The intellectual driving force behind these programmes—the Institute of Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden—had been set up in 1921, at the peak of the fashion for the subject. It was not dismantled until fifty-five years later. What,
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