Recent Developments in Swedish Population Policy. Part I.

The article presents information on recent developments in Swedish population policy. Sweden is one of the countries in which the demographic situation has been most serious. And it is also a country in which one of the most comprehensive programmes of population policies has been put forward and implemented. In 1935 the first Population Commission was set up. The Commission made several inquiries into various aspects of the population problem, including the question of the causes of the declining birth-rate, and in the years 1936-8 put forward a number of proposals. The new Commission set up in 1946 discussed various aspects of population policy without feeling bound either by the work or by the points of view of its predecessor. The problems under discussion have been somewhat similar for the two commissions. Sex problem, birth control, voluntary parenthood, and the like, occupied a central position in the work of the first Commission, but this was not the case for the new Commission.