Sir, - Catherine Cleary's article on Sweden's "ugly secret" of forced sterilisations (The Irish Times, August 30th) smacks of journalistic sensationalism. To begin with, these so-called "revelations" are no secret at all, as I can clearly recall hearing and reading about this practice when I was a student in the 1960s.
Ms Cleary made huge conceptual jumps from sterilisations (with or without consent) to eugenics and on to genocide! This is quite insensitive in the context of the millions who died under Hitler and regarding what happened more recently in Bosnia - the two examples to which she referred. She did not discuss how one reconciles the natural proclivity of most people, including the intellectually impaired, to engage in sexual activity with the potential difficulties concerning the demands of parenthood. In some countries the attitude was that sexuality in these circumstances should be suppressed. However, in many other countries, competent parenthood and family planning may have been more of an issue.
It should be borne in mind that not every nation held the same level of moral objection to sterilisation as found in the more traditional Catholic regimes. Hence sterilisations were conducted in many states besides Sweden.
This context was not given by Ms Cleary.
Moreover, in pre-second-World -War Europe, two rival ideologies dominated the socio-political landscape. On the extreme right there was Hitler who took the Englishman Francis Galton's ideas on eugenics to unspeakable and horrific levels in the Holocaust. On the ultra-left there was Stalin who, in the spirit of Trofim Lysenko's dogma of radical environmentalism, went to similar extremes with his "social engineering", which also cost millions of lives. Galton had too much faith in our ability to solve problems by changing nature (now referred to as genetic engineering rather than eugenics), and Lysenko erred in the opposite direction by placing all his faith in the manipulation of nurture. The dictators Hitler and Stalin exploited these opposing viewpoints for their own political ends.
Ms Cleary's critique did not take into account the above historical setting. Instead she tried to sensationalise Sweden's case by placing it solely and squarely in a "fascist", "weeding-out" and "ethnic cleansing" discourse. her added comment that Sweden conducted its sterilisation programme with "Teutonic efficiency" betrays an inverted racism - albeit expressed in another Teutonic tongue, that of Cromwell. - Yours, etc.,
Monkstown, Co Dublin.