Infanticide, Abortion, Children, and Childhood in Sweden, 1000–1980

Abstract

The life course of women and men in most soc1et1es simply does not allow for childbirth and rearing during the entire period women are able to reproduce. Choices ha ve always been made not to ha ve children. Child bearing and the choices it involves have also been a source of social, cultural, and political conflict as the historiography of women, family, and fertility makes very clear. Yet it is also evident that revealing a society's attitudes towards infanticide and abortion, the subjects dealt with here, exposes the parameters of what is sanctioned or accepted as ways to limit reproduction in any particular society at any particular moment in time. Determining these restrictions has been central to policies on the regulation of populations practiced by the church, the state, government agencies, and civil society organizations such as medical societies and philanthropic organizations. Boundaries were also set by the norms developed in families and kinship networks. The negotiations related to these !imitations reflect not only the position of women and concepts of family, but they are also integrated into the understanding of children and childhood during different periods of time.Critical issues such as these have been addressed through legal changes, the development and use of church registers, the establishment of midwives, the refinement of statistical surveys, the spread of education, and the conscious development of family and population policy. In a wider context, the understanding of populationchange and analyses of sexual behavior also had a bearing on and interacted with the techniques and technology of governance as early as the introduction of Chnstianity, during the debates on the high rates of infanticide of the seventeenth century, during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions about the predicament of unwed mothers, and in the discussions on the rise of the welfare system <luring the early to mid-twentieth century. The alternatives that emerged over the course of the centuries - criminalization, moral sanctions, more lenient legislation, the use of welfare schemes, and information campaigns - all had relevance, but the development of new surveillance techniques and knowledge systems also formed and transformed the understandings of the identity of the fetus and the newly born. The conflicts during the introduction of the Christian church form the backdrop for this article, begmnmg with the early modern era. It continues through the pivotal legislative action of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and then discusses the political and sc1enufic premises on which the Swedish welfare system was created in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.