Only the best will do: others run the risk of being sterilised. Marian Pallister examines a Swedish eugenics scandal that has reverberations in Britain

THE dictionary definition of the word ''eugenics'' conjures up an image of Hitler's search for the master race: ''the science of the production of fine offspring by control of inherited qualities.'' This manipulation of the population was the nightmare of Nazi Germany, perpetrated by the Fuhrer's mad henchmen.

Only now we find it was not confined to the Third Reich: that in Sweden, Denmark and Norway between the mid 1920s and the mid 1970s, more than 100,000 people, 90% of them women, were sterilised because their race, lifestyle or mental capacities were deemed undesirable. It was a trend led by left-wingers which is now described by Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish Minister for Social Policy, as ''barbaric and a national disgrace.'' Now historians and legal experts say the theory of eugenics has been no stranger to British shores.

Last week, Swedish newspaper reports revealed that the policy in Sweden was applied to alcoholics, travellers, and those who did not conform to a look established by the National Institute for Racial Biology. It was carried out before Hitler came to power, and continued until 1976. Boys in borstals were routinely sterilised in spring before being sent to work on farms. In Denmark, a law was passed in 1929 to sterilise the mentally handicapped. Norway followed in 1934, and the prominent left-winger who pushed for the law to be passed considered the Nazi policy insufficient because it only applied to hereditary complaints. In the 1960s and seventies, Swedish housing workers were asked to report tenants whom they believed should not procreate.

Swedish historians believe the conspiracy of silence which has surrounded these policies is linked to an unwillingness to come to terms with the past. In Britain, while no eugenics policy has ever been imposed, it is alarming to realise that if ''genetic engineering'' is the buzz phrase of the 1990s, ''eugenics'' was the intellectual catchphrase in this country between the First and Second World Wars.

Dr Lynn Abrams, expert in European history at Glasgow University, said: ''Similar things to what went on in the Nordic countries were being discussed in Britain and the United States between the wars. There was a whole discourse on eugenics linked with worries about the strengthening of the race after the losses of the First World War.'' Dr Abrams added that while much of the theorising stayed just that, there were parallels, such as women in Britain being locked up in mental institutions for having illegitimate babies.

In Scandinavia, eugenics become a policy on grounds of race and health and did not stop until 1976 when there were worries about a drop in population figures. In France during the inter-war years, the emphasis was on women having more children, so Dr Abrams believes the country may have escaped this ideology. In Germany, Hitler took eugenics to extremes, having mothers described as ''feeble-minded'' sterilised. Often these were simply women living in poverty struggling to bring up families.

Today we view genetics with a sceptical eye. In the early part of the century, the science was seen as something positive. The Eugenics Education Society drew its membership from teachers, social workers and individuals from the middle classes, and was concerned by the growing problem presented by ''the feeble-minded.'' In 1904, in response to growing public pressure, a Royal Commission was appointed under the chairmanship of the Earl of Radnor.

After four years, the Commission concluded that heredity was an important factor in mental deficiency, that ''defectives'' were often highly prolific, and other social problems such as delinquency, alcoholism and illegitimacy were aggravated by the fact that so many ''defectives'' were allowed complete freedom of action in the community. Guardianship, however, rather than purification of the race, was recommended, and despite fierce lobbying by the Eugenics Education Society, the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 did not deal with the issue of sterilisation.

The question did not go away, however. In the 1920s and again in the 1930s, segregation or sterilisation were proposed by the Education Authority and the Board of Control for the insane, paupers, epileptics, criminals, alcoholics, prostitutes and the unemployable. Even Marie Stopes, pioneer of birth control in Britain, did not practise her science for simply altruistic reasons. Anne Marie McKay of the Family Planning Association said: ''Marie Stopes was a bit of a eugenic who saw birth control partly as a class thing.''

Controversy has continued to rage, but Colin McKay, legal and policy adviser to Enable, the Scottish society for the mentally handicapped, confirms that sterilisation of the mentally handicapped has been carried out and is still carried out in Britain. Enable supports Scottish Law Commission proposals to clarify the law, thrown into sharp relief last year in Edinburgh when a mother sought through the courts to have her mentally handicapped daughter sterilised, and feels that that there is a need for specific and clear guidance on the limited circumstances where sterilisation might be appropriate.

Mr McKay said: ''From the turn of the century to the 1930s, eugenics was fairly fashionable in Britain. Everyone now holds up their hands in horror, but until Hitler, people like H G Wells proposed the sterilisation of 'the feeble-minded'.'' The answer in Britain to the problem of the mentally handicapped procreating was to institutionalise rather than sterilise. That sterilisation still goes on in not a question Mr McKay's mind, but he says there is now more awareness of the rights and legalities of those concerned. ''There has not been a policy in this country as in the Nordic countries,'' he said, ''not a deliberate policy.''

But it routinely happened, and anecdotally, I am aware that if a mentally handicapped woman in an institution got pregnant, she was sent to hospital ostensibly for a D & C, but had a termination and sterilisation. In England, sterilisation is sometimes justified by saying the person, often a teenage girl, is having period problems. That takes away the taint of eugenics. But lots of women have period difficulties and they don't all get sterilised.''