Sterilization policies, moral rehabilitation and the politics of amends

Abstract

The article studies policy debates about coming to terms with historic sterilization policies in Germany, Norway, and the Czech Republic. Starting from the assumption that involuntary sterilization forms a double injury that both destroys a person’s reproductive faculty and attaches a stigma of inferior worth to the person, the article examines what – if anything – was framed as wrong about involuntary sterilization and whether the aspect of stigmatization and differential worth was addressed in these debates. It argues that a politics of amends can, in principle, revoke the stigma and provide moral rehabilitation but that governments were unwilling or reluctant to do so, particularly concerning stigmatization along notions of normality and fitness. Problematizations were largely confined to an unlawfulness frame and a group discrimination frame. Within the former, the logic of differential worth could not be addressed, within the latter only insofar as it disproportionately affected ethnoracially constructed groups but not individuals marked as ill, disabled or unfit.