Representatives of the Finnish society of sign language, which unites people with hearing disabilities, demand from the state official apologies and compensation for the policy of forced sterilization of deaf women in the country. Reports about it Hufvudstadsbladet.

According to the Marriage Law adopted in Finland in 1929, deaf Finns were forbidden to marry each other without special permission from the President of the country. Often, many women were given an ultimatum - either to undergo a sterilization procedure, or to forget about marriage.

“(Forced) sterilization is an act of violence and a serious violation of human rights that has become the norm,” Maya Koivisto, a teacher at the Middle School for Deaf Children, told the newspaper, calling on the state to accept responsibility for what happened.

The Marriage Act was only one of the elements of the eugenics-based policy of improving nation health based on eugenics in Finland — the theory of human breeding. He replaced the old law of 1734, adopted when the country was part of Sweden. According to it, marriages between patients with hereditary epilepsy were forbidden. In 1929, the ban on marriages other than the deaf also extended to other categories - epileptics, mentally ill, mentally retarded, and patients with venereal diseases. In some cases, marriages were allowed if it was possible to obtain appropriate permission from the president of the country.

This legislation was valid until 1969. However, Maya Koivisto claims that sterilization under pressure was also noted later.

“Until now, I believed that sterilization lasted until the 1950s, 1960s. But I heard about a case when in the 90s a doctor suggested that his deaf patient undergo sterilization, ”she said in an interview with Hufvudstadsbladet.

In 1935, Finland adopted a law on sterilization, according to which some citizens, especially the mentally ill, were subjected to a forced deprivation of reproductive functions. The remaining carriers of hereditary diseases were asked to undergo sterilization voluntarily. In 1950, this law was finalized and was valid until 1970.

According to official statistics given in the book by the Finnish researcher Markku Mattila, the greatest number of sterilizations fell on post-war time. From 1935 to 1950, including the period when Finland from 1941 to 1944 was an ally of Hitler's Germany, only 996 such operations were performed, whereas in 1969 only 5,449. A total of more than 11,000 people in Finland became victims of the sterilization policy .

  • Finnish women, 1920s.
  • Gettyimages.ru
  • © United Archives

In the pre-war years, a similar policy was also carried out in other countries of the Scandinavian Peninsula, said Konstantin Voronov, head of the regional problems and conflicts department of the European Political Studies Department of the IMEMO RAN, in an interview with RT.

“This is a sad page in the history of our northern neighbors, a historical stage connected with the ideas that existed in society about how human nature can be improved. These ideas were associated with the spread of pseudo-scientific eugenistic teachings, according to which such anti-human intervention in human nature can improve the quality of the nation and prevent the transmission of hereditary diseases, ”he said.

According to the expert, deaf women will be able to obtain an apology and compensation from the Government of Finland.

“First, they represent a small contingent of Finnish society. Secondly, society and the state have become more tolerant. Compensation can be partly material, partly legislative, ”believes Voronov.

Scientific racism

The Finnish Marriage Act of 1929 was drafted on the basis of legislation passed in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in 1913. At the beginning of the twentieth century, eugenic legislation, including forced sterilization, was adopted in all Scandinavian countries.

In Sweden alone, from 1935 to 1975, 63,000 people were subjected to this procedure in accordance with the law “on the purity of race”. They only waited for apologies and compensations in 1997. In order to stand in line for sterilization, it was necessary to have a different appearance from the Nordic one, or, for example, to show inability to learn.

The most famous is the eugenic policy of the Third Reich. In order to achieve the “purity of the race” here in 1933, at about the same time as in the Nordic countries, the Law “On the Prevention of the Birth of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases” was adopted. Its victims were 400 thousand people subjected to enforced sterilization. However, in Hitler's Germany they did not hesitate to send people to concentration camps and create special programs for breeding Aryan supermen (Lebensborn) in order to “purify the nation”.

  • Measurement of skulls in the Third Reich.
  • Gettyimages.ru
  • © Henry Guttmann

However, the first to introduce eugenic legislation began far beyond Europe - in the United States. It began in 1907 in the state of Indiana, where for the first time in the world the law on forced sterilization was approved. Following similar laws were enacted in several other states. As a rule, this procedure was applied to convicted and mentally ill people. Despite the fact that after the Second World War, this practice began to be identified with the atrocities of Nazism, it existed in the United States for decades. And in some states, such as the state of Washington, there are still laws on forced sterilization.

At the national level, the eugenic legislation of Japan turned out to be the most long-lived. From 1948 to 1996, a law on eugenics was in force in the country, replacing the earlier act of 1940. According to a study by Japanese scientist Matsubara Yoko, 800 thousand people were victims of sterilization, according to other estimates, there were about 20 thousand. Neither in Japan nor in the USA, the victims of eugenics did not receive any compensation.

“Western culture is characterized by civilizational racism, racial theories,” Valery Korovin, a political scientist and director of the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, explained in an interview with RT the popularity of eugenics in the last century. - These phenomena were born in Europe and have been widely used there for centuries. Echoes of these approaches, despite the general formal humanization of the West, are still present there. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the spread of eugenistic theories in the West. ”

Ordinary genocide

In addition to people with disabilities, national minorities often came under the pressure of eugenic policies in Western countries. So, in the framework of the policy of "racial hygiene" in Norway, carried out before the 1970s, the forced sterilization of gypsies was practiced.

In Sweden, representatives of the Sami people accuse the state of carrying out forced sterilization as part of the policy of "cultural genocide" and "discrimination" against the indigenous people of the Far North.

  • Representative of the Sami people.
  • AFP
  • © SVEN NACKSTRAND

Since the 1930s, the United States has expanded the policy of sterilization on its colonial possession - the island of Puerto Rico, where Latin Americans were subjected to operations. In the 1970s, US authorities conducted the forced sterilization of Indian women. According to the United States General Accounting Office, only from 1973 to 1976, 3,406 Native American women were sterilized. In the southern states of the United States, during the eugenic programs, most of the victims of sterilization were black women.

In Peru, during the reign of pro-Western President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s and 2000s, a program was being implemented to sterilize indigenous women, mainly Quechua and Aymara .

Even in Israel there was a place for politics in the spirit of the Third Reich. In the early 2000s, a scandal erupted in the Israeli media over accusations against the authorities in the chemical sterilization of emigrant women from Ethiopia.

According to Korovin, the use of eugenics tools to combat the indigenous population devalues ​​any appeals of Western countries to the rhetoric of "human rights", especially in relation to Russia. With attempts to introduce eugenics in the USSR, it was completed under Joseph Stalin, thanks to which the country avoided the monstrous mass sterilizations inherent in Western countries.

“The West has no moral right to express any claims to Russia. Since the West in no way compares to cruelty, inhumanity and totalitarianism of its approaches with humane, democratic and free against its background Russia, and a huge number of historical episodes are evidence of that, ”Korovin stressed.