Indigenous women seek compensation from Denmark for forced IUD insertion

Sixty-seven women from Greenland have asked the Danish government for compensation over forced birth control inflicted on them between 1966 and 1970.

According to the BBC, at least 4,500 women, including teenagers, indigenous to Greenland were given contraceptive intrauterine devices (IUDs) by the Danish government during that time frame in order to slow the birth rate of indigenous people. An official inquiry into the matter is scheduled to be completed in 2025, but the women want compensation now. Many of them are in their 70s.

“We don’t want to wait for the results of the inquiry,” said psychologist Naja Lyberth, who initiated the compensation claim. “We are getting older. The oldest of us, who had IUDs inserted in the 1960s, were born in the 1940s and are approaching 80. We want to act now.”

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The forced contraception scheme was exposed during a 2022 podcast from Danish broadcaster DR. According to the BBC, records from the national archives reveal that from 1966 to 1970 alone, 4,500 women were given IUDs without their consent or even their knowledge. Some of those women were teenage girls as young as 13. It is estimated that by the end of 1969, 35% of indigenous women who could have had children had been given an IUD. The scheme continued until at least 1975, though the BBC said it learned that it went on after 1975 to as late as 1991, when Greenland took control of its own healthcare system.

The Danish and Greenland governments commissioned a team of researchers to investigate the cases as well as the decisions that led to the administration of forced contraception. The women are seeking 300,000 Danish crowns, the equivalent of $42,380 each, prior to the end date of the inquisition, which is set for May of 2025.

This is not the first human rights issue to come up in recent years concerning Denmark and Greenland. Last year, Denmark apologized for a 1950s experiment in which it took children from Greenland to Denmark. Known as the Little Danes experiment, 22 Greenlandic Inuit children were sent to live with Danish families in order to be re-educated as ‘little Danes.’ A year and a half later, they were returned to Greenland, but not to their families. They were instead placed in an orphanage away from their families and other Greenlanders, and were forbidden to speak their native language.