Sweden: Taking Sex Seriously

Sweden, which generally plays it lightly, last week was in an uproar about sex. The cause was a petition of protest to King Gustav VI Adolf signed by 140 eminent Swedish physicians, including the King’s own doctor. Their plea to the monarch and to the government: take swift steps to stop sexual laxity, which “is a menace to the vitality and health of the nation.”

For years, in Sweden, premarital intercourse has been widely condoned, and the government provides legal abortions when deemed “in the mother’s interest.” The result, warned the doctors, has been a tide of extramarital pregnancies and mounting venereal disease—with most of the victims young people. Sweden’s gonorrhea rate has jumped 75% in five years, and of last year’s new cases, 52% were among teenagers.

Reform Talk. The physicians placed the blame squarely on Sweden’s schools, where sex education starts in the first grade, pointing out that young minds —unless taught differently—can confuse instruction with encouragement. Arguing that “chastity in no way is harmful to health,” the doctors declared that “monogamous marriage [with] common responsibility for the children, is the natural order of life.” In sum, the doctors urged schools to teach “what is right and wrong.”

The petition was prompted in part by a proposal, currently under study, to reduce the two hours a week of religious instruction given in high schools. A shocking idea, implied the doctors, insisting that Christian doctrine, especially as it applies to adultery, must be stressed even more as just about the only way to stem growing sexual license. Said one of the signers, Dr. Sigurd Elvin: “Young people in Sweden are not happy. They lack the Ten Commandments in their upbringing.”

Reluctant Rethink. Publication of the petition brought angry cries from Stockholm’s “cultural radicals”—the powerful Establishment of secular-minded writers, editors and pedagogues who have been instrumental in, making Sweden a sociological laboratory. “The letter wants to introduce blind authoritarianism!” roared one newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. Authoress Kristina Ahlmark Michanek, 25, a free-love advocate whose latest tome, For Friendship’s Sake, is a Swedish bestseller, declared indignantly: “It is a human right to go to bed with someone you like without being insulted by society.” After all, she and others pointed out, prostitution is fast dying out in their country. They accused the doctors of having fallen into the clutches of Moral ReArmament, argued that morals are not the province of physicians or priests but of psychiatrists. Indeed, Moral ReArmament may have been an indirect influence behind the morality petition; two doctors in a Stockholm clinic who helped initiate it are supporters of the movement. But, said one physician, “Things are pretty bad, and it does not matter who says it.”

The doctors’ dissent was described by one observer as “a shot fired when the battle is over.” Yet it did stir some reluctant rethinking. Stockholm’s prestigious daily, Expressen, which bitterly attacked the petition, concluded that “the uneasiness about these problems must not be dismissed as a bagatelle. It is now time for emotional disarmament and calm self-analysis.”