Abstract
AbstractWhile Norway in the 1930s had relatively liberal policies with regard to access to contraceptives, and an increasing number of legal abortions were carried out, the regime that was installed after occupation in 1940 reined them in, fuelled not only by Nazi ideology but by what new the regime saw as a most threatening population decrease. With reference to population policies in other West-European countries, this article compares Norwegian population policies under occupation with that of the 1930s, discusses if the policy towards all groups were the same, and the extent to which the new policies contributed to increasing birth rates in occupied Norway.
Highlights
Recent work on the baby boom has moved its onset from post-war to the late 1930s and in some cases to the war years,[4] and this temporal shift has provoked new interest in interwar fertility
Sanchez-Barricarte dismissed the rise in birth rates having anything to do with restricted access to contraceptives; if people wanted to avoid pregnancies, they could have resorted to traditional means.[7]
At the other end of the scale, Glass concluded that the Scandinavian countries were likely to pass legislation that would allow abortion on medical, eugenic, humane and social grounds
Summary
Our main sources from the war years were produced by the Population Office (Befolkningskontoret) which was under the Ministry of Interior’s Health. The material has not been utilised for research, in contrast to sources produced by the clinic in Oslo, which was the largest.[15] The archives of the birth control clinics are far from complete for several reasons. The clinics destroyed their index cards and other material soon after the occupation to prevent it from falling into German hands. Source material from the Population Office and from war trials against leading Nazis has been useful to provide a clearer picture of what happened to birth control and the birth control clinics after their closure. Literature on the fertility decline has been of help, as we discuss below
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