(LifeSiteNews) — The Danish government forced contraceptives onto the population of Greenland for decades, an investigation revealed.
In the 1960s and ’70s, thousands of Inuit women and girls were fitted with intra-uterine devices (IUDs) by Danish doctors as part of a government program to prevent them from reproducing.
A few cases of forced contraception took place after the 1970s as well, and as late as 2018, the BBC reported.
The scale of the program was first publicized by a Danish investigative podcast called “Spiralkampagnen” (the coil campaign). The IUDs implanted in the women’s uterus are commonly referred to as coils.
In the past couple of years, many Greenlandic women have publicly stated that they received these coils without their knowledge or consent.
National archive records revealed that 4,500 women and girls, including some as young as 13, had IUDs implanted between 1966 and 1970. However, it remains unclear how many were administered without the women’s consent.
A group of 143 women has filed a lawsuit against Denmark demanding adequate compensation. Most of these women were under 18 at the time they were fitted with the IUDs.
The former prime minister of Greenland, Mute Egede, called the program a “genocide,” as the population growth of Greenland significantly slowed down in the 1970s from previous high numbers.
Denmark and Greenland agreed to investigate the coil scandal in 2022. Following this investigation, a formal inquiry was launched, and its findings are set to be released next month.
Greenland was a colony of Denmark until 1953 and has increasingly gained more independence over the past decades, but remains an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.
A belated apology
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has now issued an apology, saying, “We cannot change what has happened. But we can take responsibility,”
“On behalf of Denmark, I would like to say sorry,” she said, acknowledging the “physical and psychological harm” the victims suffered.
“Even though we do not have the full picture,” Frederiksen stated, “it makes a serious impression on the government, that so many Greenlandic women unanimously report that they have been subjected to abuse by the Danish healthcare system.”
READ: Denmark expands abortion from 12 to 18 weeks
The ideology of de-population
Denmark was not the only country that engaged in forced contraception and sterilization in the post World War II era.
Eugenics-based sterilization programs of native Americans and those deemed undesirable, for instance, due to mental health issues, were active in the United States and Canada until the 1970s. In the U.S., an estimated 100,000-150,000 people were sterilized each year under duress. In Sweden, around 60,000 people, mostly women, were forcibly sterilized under the country’s eugenics law, active from 1935 to 1975.
Other countries with similar programs included Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Bangladesh, India, and Japan. The worst eugenic program was run by communist China, whose one-child policy included millions of forced sterilizations and abortions.
In the decades after the Second World War, the narrative that the world would soon become “overpopulated” was widespread, and led to governments enacting eugenic policies and propaganda campaigns for contraception and abortion. In 1968, the Club of Rome was founded, an organization that gained significant political influence and claimed that rapid population growth would destroy the planet. In the same year, Paul Ehrlich published his infamous book, The population bomb, warning of a population explosion that would lead to worldwide famines by the end of the 1970s. Although his alarmist claims turned out to be completely wrong, his Malthusian ideology continues to influence politics and popular culture.
