Sterilization policies were implemented by many Western countries in the course of the 20th century, mostly including the possibility of involuntary sterilization.
The paper examines how governments and society in Germany, Norway and the Czech Republic have responded to sterilization victims’ claims to reparation and apology. It argues that involuntary sterilization is a double injury: a physical and a moral one. It marks a person as being of inferior worth to society and thereby inflicts a stigma upon her or him. Understanding this stigma, the paper argues, is critical for understanding both victims’ struggles for reparations and apology and governments’ reluctance to respond to these struggles. The reverse process to stigmatization would be moral rehabilitation; or vice versa: through providing moral rehabilitation to victims, governments can in principle reverse the stigma. They can do so through properly drafted political reparations and/or an official apology.
However, it seems to take governments a big effort to provide moral rehabilitation to sterilization victims. The reason, this paper argues, is that, at least for a long time, governments did not consider the policy rationale behind sterilization policy incompatible with the basic norms and values of the present state. Thus, the political rationality that had made certain groups vulnerable to state-sponsored abuse in the first place, respectively its endurance or non-endurance, is decisive for the question whether victims receive moral rehabilitation or not.
The paper shows, that governments in these three countries have responded differently to victims’ claims. It concludes that governments, if they provided moral rehabilitation at all, they did so only once after vital public debate and pressure from civil society and only at a time when and to the extent that the policy rationale behind the policy at stake was deemed incompatible with the fundamental norms and values of the present state.
