The research project focus on legal abortion in Sweden 1938 – 1974. The starting point is motivated by the fact that abortion was decriminalized on medical, humanitarian and eugenic grounds in 1938. The study ends with the the introduction of abortion on demand in 1975. What is here defined as legal abortion was a centralised system, where abortion-seeking women had to apply at one of specific centers with councellors, gynecologists and psychiatrists that were set up. The final decision was made by the National Board of Health and Welfare.

A theoretical perspective in the study is medicalization, and more specific psychiatrization as a form of medicaliztion. Ideas about women, womanhood and motherhood are analyzed, as well as medical theory and praxis, and political change. The restrictive 1950´s, a decade when the legal abortions were reduced by 50 percent, is of specific interest.

The study shows that the psychiatrization of abortion och abortion-seeking women took place in 1/ language: through the use of psychiatric terminology och diagnoses such as psychastenia, feeble mindedness and mental insufficiency; 2/ by establishing centers for abortion applications with psychiatrists, and the socialpsychiatric committe at the National Board of Health and Welfare; and 3/ praxis: in the thorough psychiatric examination of womens mood, attention, memory, intelligence age etc., and in the fact that abortion seeking women could be hospitalized for observation and investigation in psychiatric clinics.

The German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer´s theory of body types (leptosomic, pyknic or athletic bodies with corresponding psychiatric disorders) was used routinely by doctors, especially in the beginning of the period. With eugenics, inherited psychiatric disorders and conditions were focused, such as feeble mindedness, and paved the way for abortion on eugenic grounds combined with a sterilization. Beside these biological/physiological based theories, social psychiatric and psychotherapeutic perspectives emerged, and a stronger focus on the life situation for the women. Relation problems, lack of  adjustment, uneasiness or anxiety were seen as reasons for a mental insufficiency that resulted in a wish for abortion. Mental hygiene became a tool for dealing with women´s abortion wishes. Mental health should be promoted, and abortions prevented. The councelling centers aim can partly be described as a control and adjustment of women. The goal was healthy and functioning wifes and mothers. Legal abortion was seen as an exception, necessary for the sick and worn-out, but part from that women should be supported to become good mothers.
 
But the psychiatrization of abortion was not the main reason for the restrictivness in the 1950´s. It is more plausible that the many abortions and abortion applications were seen as a challenge and a failure for the swedish welfare society that had the ambition to prevent unwanted pregnancies  through sex education, access to contraceptives and social reforms. During the 1940´s and 1950´s, women were, according to their supposed nature, expected to put motherhood in the first place. This idea of women and motherhood was the basis for the abortion councellors, and it was also promoted by female politicians like for example the social democrat Inga Thorsson.

At the same time, there was one group of women that society did not favor as mothers: the so-called feeble minded. There were several reasons for this. One was that these women were seen as incapable of taking care of their children, another that it was in the interest of public health and society to prevent the spread of their unwanted inheritance. Applications for abortion on eugenic grounds were possible throughout the period, from 1938 until 1975. Most eugenic abortions were made in the 1940´s, and they were never controversial or debated at that time.

The 1960´s meant change. Psychiatrists, gynecologists and councellors critizised the restrictive abortion law, sex liberal youth organizations advocated for the introduction of abortion on demand, and politicians and others targeted the ideal of women as house wives and the idea that motherhood was the primary goal for women. At the same time, women were more and more part of the debate; women who described the abortion application system as offensive, women who had been denied abortion, who had had illegal abortions or travelled to Poland for abortion. Public opinion started to change in favor of a liberalization of the abortion law. The abortion issue became politizised and demedicalized. Abortion was more and more seen as right. Psychiatrists were still holding key positions but at the end of the 1960´s and in the beginning of the 1970´s, nearly all abortion applications were approved. At the same time, the number of abortions increased. In 1975, womens right to abortion on demand was introduced.