Compulsory sterilisation in Sweden


Compulsory sterilisation in Sweden were sterilisations which were carried out in Sweden, without a valid consent of the subject, during the years 1906–1975 on eugenic, medical and social grounds. Between 1972 and 2012, sterilisation was also a condition for gender reassignment surgery.

Legal grounds

The general rule between 1941 and 1976 was that sterilisation was illegal, but there were three grounds on which sterilisation could be permitted:
It was never legal to physically restrain a person.
From 1944, the number of eugenic sterilisations under the 1941 legal provisions gradually decreased.

Statistics

The number of eugenic sterilisations peaked in the 1940s; from 1946, the number of sterilisations under the 1941 legal provisions gradually decreased.
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. In half of the cases they found no sign of coercion or pressure, but signs of the applicants' own initiative. Tydén uses these percentages to make an estimate of the number of operations under coercion. He found that 15,000 were made as a condition for release and that another 5500 to 6000 were made under other kinds of pressure, whereas 30,000 were voluntary and on the applicants' own initiative.
From the 2000s, the Swedish state paid out damages to victims who filed for compensation.

Sterilisation during sex change

Until 2012, sterilisation was mandatory before sex change. This last mandatory sterilisation has been criticised by several political parties in Sweden and since 2011 the Parliament of Sweden was expected to change the law but ran into opposition from the Christian Democrat party. After efforts to overturn the law failed in parliament, the Stockholm Administrative Court of Appeal overturned the law on 19 December 2012, declaring it unconstitutional after the law was challenged by an unidentified plaintiff.