Better People: The Connection Between Birth Control and Eugenics in Icelandic Discourse 1923-1938

Public discussion in Iceland on birth control began in 1923, when Guðmundur Hannesson, one of the most respected medical doctors of his generation, wrote an article on the subject in the Icelandic medical journal Læknablaðið. He believed birth control — which comprises contraception use, abortion, and sterilization — should be practiced more widely in Iceland, above all for eugenic reasons, to counteract the impending “degeneration” of the nation. Guðmundur’s article was indicative of the tenor of the discourse which was to grow around these issues in the interwar years. Academics and doctors led the discussion among the professional classes while women’s rights activists brought the issue to the wider public. Both groups overwhelmingly focussed on the eugenic benefits of birth control. Educational literature on the topic was translated and widely distributed in the twenties; this brought sometimes very radical discourse from abroad into the public sphere in Iceland. Some approached the issue from the standpoint of German racial science and national socialism; others advocated Scandinavian welfare eugenics. In the thirties, birth control and eugenics loomed large in the public discourse. In 1931, the left-wing doctor and women’s rights activist Katrín Thoroddsen held a famous lecture on “Free Love”, subsequently broadcast on the national radio and released as a popular book. This lecture promoted a Scandinavian welfare eugenicist view on birth control. The national socialist view was introduced at the Reykjavík Medical Association’s 1934 Hygiene Exhibition, which was held in collaboration with German propagandist agencies and was partly devoted to de - fend ing and promoting Nazi methods of the sterilization of undesireables. Between 1934 and 1938, Vilmundur Jónsson, the director of health, wrote two bills on birth control: one on contraception and abortion, the other on sterilization. Both were passed into law. The sterilization law may have been occasioned in part by an illegal sterilization performed by a doctor in the Westman Islands in 1932, seemingly for eugenic reasons. Vilmundur was careful to distance his sterilization law from such practices and those of Nazi Germany, but the law was nevertheless eugenicist in its aims, legalizing the sterilization of undesirables as well as abortions for women who were suspected of bearing undesirable offspring. In 1938, birth control was not only widely and publicly discussed in Iceland but also defined in and subject to law, a sea-change from the situation in 1923. This change cannot be extricated from the spread of eugenicist ideas, which were commonly accepted and received little or no criticism as such in Iceland during the research period. In the interwar years, eugenics ideology in Iceland spanned a wide range, from the Scandinavian welfare version (nominally aimed at furthering equality) to the national socialist version (which openly promoted an extreme inequality). These ideologies were seen as an essential justification of the practice of birth control, a development which has clear parallels in Europe and America during the same period.