Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

governance and regulation by the state and other societal bodies. They note
that though reproductive issues affect most women to some degree, the right to
exercise reproductive choice is determined to a large extent by class and ethnicity.
Women with low income often depend on the government concerning
their reproduction issues. And women from various ethnic minorities can be
disadvantaged in exercising their choices concerning reproduction because of
cultural constraints or because of prejudice from the side of those authorities
who may govern their bodies, for example policymakers, medical practitioners
and social workers. 17 There are, for example, issues of medical practice, including
the forced sterilisation of women. Forced sterilisation is the process of
permanently ending someone’s ability to reproduce without his or her consent.
Historically sterilisation, mainly the sterilisation of women, was used long before
the laws of sterilisation were passed in many countries, primarily on a
medical indication, from the mid-nineteenth century when safe sterilisation
techniques were introduced. 18 In the twentieth century sterilisation became a
tool of social policy and sometimes of oppressive regimes. Nowadays it is used
against national or international minorities like Roma people. In the 1920s
and 1930s, sterilisation laws were passed in many states of the United States, in
Switzerland, in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Estonia, I celand, Mexico
(Vera Cruz), Cuba, former Czechoslovakia, former Yugoslavia, Lithuania,
Latvia, Hungary and Turkey. 19 Throughout the years, sterilisation has been
denounced for having been performed illegally or unethically: for example,
the Swedish case – a bill of sterilisation was enacted in 1934 and expanded
in 1941; both bills were concerned with the “feeble-minded” and “asocial”
members of society. 20 The parliamentary debate concerning sterilisation laws
in Sweden began in 1922; the public discourse concerned racial hygiene, seeking
to enhance what was referred to as the quality of the Swedish population.
Three groups were prohibited from marrying under the Swedish laws: the
mentally deficient, the mentally ill and epileptics. In 1933-1934, the eugenic
argumentation was replaced by a primarily social one, though it was clearly
linked with hereditary genetics. 21 The central claim from the social perspective
17
Ibid.
18
Lene Koch, “Eugenic sterilization in Scandinavia.” The European Legacy 11, no. 3, (2006): 299–309.
19
Nikolas Rose, “The politics of life itself.” Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 6, 2001: 1–30.
20
Alaberto Spektorowski and Elisabet Mizrachi. “Eugenics and the welfare state in Sweden: the politics of social margins
and the idea of a productive society.” Journal of Contemporary History 39, (2004) 333–352.
21
Ibid.
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