Abstract
Using the concept of psychiatrization as an aspect of medicalization, Lennerhed shows how legal abortion in Sweden increasingly came to be seen as a psychiatric issue in the 1940s and 1950s. In the Swedish welfare state, where abortion on medical, eugenic, and humanitarian grounds had been introduced in 1938, politicians, doctors, and the women’s movement protected the notion of good motherhood while abortion was described as a last resort. Women’s demand for abortion was explained by factors such as mental insufficiency. The diagnoses on women applying for abortion can thus be interpreted as a disciplinary process.
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Notes
- 1.
The concept of medicalization has been used as a theoretical tool by sociologists, feminist researchers, and others since the 1960s. The concept of psychiatrization has not gained ground in the same way but was used by Michel Foucault in his Histoire de la sexualité. 1. La Volonté de savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
- 2.
Elisabeth Sjövall was chair of RFSU from 1961 to 1964 and replaced by Thorsten Sjövall, who was the organization’s president from 1964 to 1972 (they were not related to each other despite their surnames). The conflicts were many, since E. Sjövall saw it as one of her main tasks to curb the influence of psychoanalysts including T. Sjövall and others in RFSU. E. Sjövall was elected to Parliament in 1957 and was the only social democratic female Member of Parliament who was not a member of the party’s Women’s Association.
- 3.
In practice, abortion on request was introduced before the change in the law. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, over 90% of all abortion requests were approved, most of them on the socio-medical indication of “anticipated weakness,” and the number of legal abortions increased: in 1968, 10,940 abortions and in 1971, 19,250 abortions (Swärd, Varför Sverige 47).
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Lennerhed, L. (2017). Troubled Women: Abortion and Psychiatry in Sweden in the 1940s and 1950s. In: Stettner, S., Ackerman, K., Burnett, K., Hay, T. (eds) Transcending Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48399-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48399-3_6
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