Australia sterilisation scandal could be tip of an iceberg

A human rights report in Australia has alleged that as many as 1,000 disabled girls and young women may have been illegally sterilised in the past six years. The Australian government has expressed its concern but has also cast doubt on the accuracy of the figures. In Sweden earlier this year the government admitted a programme of enforced sterilisation had been carried out between the mid-1930s and the late 1970s. A number of other countries have also recently acknowledged sterilisations of mentally handicapped people had taken place on a much bigger scale than had previously been thought. John Pickford reports on the issues raised by the latest Australian allegations.

In Australia a court order is required before any legal sterilisation operation can be carried out.

But the country's Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission says these legal constraints have been ignored in a significant number of cases, many of them involving mentally sub-normal girls and young women.

Australia's Health Minister, Mike Wooldridge, made clear his concern while questioning whether the Commission had drawn the right conclusions from the data it has looked at.

There has been acknowledgement, however, from the Australian medical authorities that some sterilisations of mentally handicapped girls and women have taken place.

The background, says the Australian Medical Association's President, Keith Woollard, is usually one of concern on the part of parents of such children.

He says: "Basically it's about fear of unwanted pregnancy in the parents of these children and the concern about whether they can cope with menstruation itself and whether that in itself would be so traumatic that it should be prevented."

But enforced or involuntary sterilisation has surfaced in a number of countries recently as a topic of serious concern.

The Swedish authorities admitted in August that thousands of handicapped girls were sterilised in Sweden as part of a government policy that continued from the mid-1930s to the late 1970s.

The revelations that a policy influenced by Nazi ideas of racial purity could have continued for decades after such theories were discredited were shattering to a nation which has long prided itself on its liberal human values.

Dr Carl Gruneveldt as director of Sweden's social welfare board was responsible for the sterilisation programme for 15 years, until it ended in 1976.

He says: "Each time (it is revealed) it is more and more shocking for our people - this paradox that Sweden, which has such a liberal welfare state, really could accept a law which was misused on such a great scale in Germany."

Since the Swedish revelations it has emerged that a number of other countries had similar policies in place in the past.

The Japanese health ministry admitted in September this year 16,000 handicapped people had been sterilised between 1949 and 1995, a much higher figure than was previously thought.

In Finland 11,000 sterilisations have been admitted under similar programmes, a figure eight times higher than official figures had indicated.

Austria, France, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Norway are other European countries where programmes of sterilisation of handicapped girls have been acknowledged.

In the United States in the early part of the 20th century sterilisation was automatic for those officially declared insane.

Apart from the moral taint of Nazi-style race policies, harrowing individual case histories have discredited any systematic use of sterilisation.

As a young girl in Sweden Maria Nordin was diagnosed as educationally subnormal, when in fact all that was wrong with her was undetected poor eyesight.

She was removed from her parents and sterilised, with tragic personal consequences.

"I had a dream of a home of my own and having my own children. I loved children. After I'd been at the institution for 10 years I was told I could leave it if I signed a paper.

"I refused but I was forced to sign. Then they took me to the hospital and did some tests. Nobody said anything about sterilisation."

There is no evidence at presence that the Australian cases are part of a systematic programme of enforced sterilisation.

The issues in Australia centre on the rights of parents of disabled children to make decisions on their children's behalf, and the question of how much the law should be involved in this.

But the shadow of enforced sterilisations by totalitarian governments still hangs over this sensitive matter.

Such policies clearly have not ended with the Nazis.

China introduced a new law in June 1995 specifically aimed at reducing the number of handicapped people in the country by sterilisation programmes.