Between 1966 and 1975, Danish doctors implanted intrauterine devices (IUDs) in half of the indigenous women in Greenland to promote health and halt the growth of the indigenous population. Apparently few of the women – some as young as 13 – gave consent.
Last week Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke announced there would be a two-year investigation into the scandal. He said he had met some of the women affected. “The pain, physical and emotional, that they felt is still there today,” he said.
The campaign for IUD insertion was no secret, but it took decades for Inuit women to speak out. And it wasn’t until two journalists from the national broadcaster DR started a podcast, Spiral Campaigns (“reel campaign”), that it has become a political issue.
It appears that as many as 4,500 women and girls – about half of all fertile women in the country – had an IUD implanted mostly between 1966 and 1970, but not ending until the mid-1970s.
The reasons seem to be downright paternalistic, racist and economic. He was praised in a 1972 issue of the Family Planning Diary as a great “success”.
In 1953 Greenland became part of Denmark. Denmark has started to invest heavily in modernizing infrastructure and social services. Danish workers (mostly men) flocked to the sparsely populated territory. Within a few years, Greenland had the highest birth rate in the world, half the population was under 16, and 25% of children were born out of wedlock.
Something must be done. The Danish authorities have launched a family planning campaign. The contraceptive of choice was an early version of an IUD because doctors believed Inuit women were too inept to use condoms or pills effectively. Doctors told reporters that they routinely insert them into women without their consent. “Only a few women who have just given birth leave the hospital without a buckle, and the same goes for women who have had an abortion,” said Jens Misfeldt, a former doctor from Greenland, in a 1977 article.
Girls sent to Denmark for boarding school also routinely received IUDs. “They didn’t ask me before the procedure, and I had no idea what it was or what the coil was,” one woman said. told the BBC in tears.
The Danish authorities believed that the native population should be controlled. “The large increase in population meant that we had to redouble our efforts if we wanted to improve living conditions,” the Danish minister for Greenland told parliament in 1970.
But today, Denmark has greater moral clarity on this shameful episode.
“We need to investigate whether or not it was genocide,” said the chairman of the Greenland Human Rights Council, Qivioq Loevstroem. “We don’t want a whitewashed report.”