Shortly afterward, the girl was sterilized. Such abuses are now abhorred, of course, but were not secrets in their time. In fact, Alberta's 1928 sterilization law was the brainchild of the provincial health and agriculture minister of the day, a cattle rancher who sought to apply his expertise in livestock breeding to humans. Today Nordin can never recover what she really wished out of life. I have never been able to have the children I wanted, and all because I didn't have enough money for a pair of glasses.
Someone has to take responsibility.
For most of the 60,000 Swedes made barren by dreams of a Nordic ideal, however, even a moral victory would be only a dim echo in their unlamented graves.