A shared history of shame: Sweden's four-decade policy of forced sterilization and the eugenics movement in the United States.

Each society has its own values and models of desirable behavior. The multiplication of socially incompetent and mentally deficient people, coupled with the corresponding diminution of the superior classes of society' has, in the eyes of some, had a detrimental effect on social classes around the world. Frenzied and over-zealous eugenicists in Sweden and the United States attempted to warn humanity of what they saw as its impending selfdestruction in the early part of the twentieth century, and now Sweden is faced with the hard truth of compensating victims of the resultant eugenics movement and compulsory sterilization. In the early part of the twentieth century, eugenics was considered the science of human betterment.2 With the emergence of highly technological and economically competitive societies, great value was placed on academic success and intelligence, and "persons whose intellectual skills are obviously less developed than the norm have traditionally been devalued and treated as deviants." 3 It was from an underlying belief in the ability to improve the human race that compulsory sterilization and the eugenics movement emerged. Coercive,4 compulsory, or involuntary sterilization involved the