Empty nests

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Finland prepared a sterilisation law based on the eugenics ideology, also. In the proposed law, people to be sterilised were divided into three groups, with deaf people placed in a group for which sterilisation was required for a marriage permit. Permitting the sterilisations of deaf people was justified by saying that it allowed them to marry in all situations. It was said to reduce their isolation, and furthermore sterilisation would be a voluntary measure. A written consent from the person was required for sterilisation. No permission was required from the spouse but he or she would be asked for a statement. In all cases, permission from the National Board of Health was required for the sterilisation.

However, in the final version of the law, which was approved in 1935, no mention was made of deaf people. However, they could request sterilisation themselves if they suspected they might give birth to ‘impaired children’. Pursuant to the interpretation of the law, sterilisation was a requirement for a marriage between deaf people. More than 7,000 women were sterilised in Finland as a result of the act on sterilisation, but as deaf women were not recorded specifically, their number is not known.

In the late 1930s, the Association for the Deaf began to campaign for a change in the law. People were particularly unhappy because there was no way to distinguish between congenital and hereditary deafness; it was impossible to prove when people who wanted to marry had become deaf. The organisation also emphasised that the likelihood of a deaf couple having deaf children was low. The marriage ban also applied to people whose deafness was regarded as congenital but not hereditary. People who wanted to marry had to submit a certificate to the health authorities to verify that neither of them had hereditary deafness. It would have been more relevant to determine whether deafness ran in their families, which could have been done by studying church records or through sufficient record keeping.

Restricting the right of deaf people to marry was a clear violation of their human rights. The situation was very difficult for deaf people who struggled to find a doctor willing to write a certificate on a matter that was so difficult to prove. Often, they had to visit several doctors before receiving the required document. Occasionally, ministers also declined to marry two deaf people. To be able to live with the person they loved, some deaf people had to live together without being married and have children born out of wedlock at a time when it was not accepted by society. According to a report in 1957, 750 deaf couples were married between 1929 and 1957 and only three couples were prevented from marrying on the account of the law.

Some deaf couples succeeded in getting married because of a loophole in the law, for example if a substitute officiating the ceremony instead of the usual minister was not aware of the legal restrictions. Even though no statistics exist on sterilisation of deaf people, some of them have talked about their difficult experiences, terminations they had to undergo, medical procedures carried out to prevent pregnancies and the general attitudes in society.