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Nuuk in Greenland: A scandal about forced contraception in the 60s and 70s has shaken the population.
Evgeniy Maloletka/AP/dpa
In the 60s and 70s, Danish doctors inserted contraceptive coils into thousands of Greenlandic women. Many say this was done without their consent. "It was hell," says one woman affected.
Naja Lyberth was 14 years old when a Danish doctor inserted an IUD into her uterus in the Greenlandic town of Maniitsoq. "It felt like knives were being pushed into me," says Lyberth in the podcast "IUD campaigns" (the IUD campaign) on Danish broadcaster DR.
All the girls in Lyberth's class had been sent to hospital in 1976 to have an IUD inserted to prevent pregnancy. Their parents had not been informed. Just like Lyberth and her classmates, thousands of Greenlandic women had IUDs inserted, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.
At the time, Denmark was responsible for health care in Greenland. Today, many of the women say that the procedure was carried out without their consent. On Wednesday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen apologized to the Greenlandic women affected on behalf of Denmark. "We cannot change what has happened. But we can take responsibility," Frederiksen said in a statement.
It was a Facebook post by Naja Lyberth from 2017 that got the reporting about the Greenlandic women and the IUDs rolling. In it, Lyberth described her experience in the hospital in Maniitsoq in 1976. Since then, more and more Greenlandic women have told of similar experiences.
In 2023, the Danish and Greenlandic governments commissioned an independent commission to investigate the IUD scandal. The commission's final report is expected in September.
To understand how the scandal came about, you have to go back to 1953. At that time, Greenland, which had been a Danish colony for more than 200 years, became part of the Kingdom of Denmark. The government in Copenhagen decided to modernize the Arctic island, 3000 kilometers away. Schools and housing are built and Danish doctors are sent to Greenland to improve health care.
Among other things, better medical care in Greenland leads to better chances of survival for newborn babies. The many Greenlandic children, on the other hand, are expensive for the Danish state - kindergartens have to be built and more Danish doctors sent to Greenland.
To stop this development, the Danish government launched the so-called spiral campaign in 1966. In the first four years of the campaign alone, 4,500 IUDs were inserted in Greenlandic women. In 1969, the government in Copenhagen estimated that 35 percent of all Greenlandic women of reproductive age had had the contraceptive inserted - and noted that the number of births in Greenland had fallen.
Many of the Greenlandic women with whom the broadcaster DR spoke found the insertion of the IUD traumatizing. Some felt they had no choice. "I couldn't fight it," says Naja Lyberth, for example. "I wasn't brought up to disagree with authority."
What's more, the IUDs used in Greenland at the time were much larger than the copper and hormone IUDs used today. They were made of plastic, were difficult to insert and were not suitable for women who had never given birth before.
"It was hell. I had a foreign body inside me for several years," recalls Naja Lyberth, who was not yet sexually active when she had the plastic IUD inserted at the age of 14. "The Danish state took away my innocence," she tells DR.
The broadcaster reports that some of the girls and women did not even know that the contraceptive had been inserted - for example during a gynecological examination. According to the Danish Institute for Human Rights, some of the Greenlandic girls were only twelve years old when they were given the IUD.
After the IUD scandal from the 60s and 70s came to light, women who had had IUDs inserted without their consent also spoke out after Greenland itself took responsibility for the health service in 1992. Greenland's head of government, Jens Frederik Nielsen, apologized to all those affected on Wednesday and promised them compensation.
Naja Lyberth and 142 other Greenlandic women have sued the Danish state for violating their human rights. The women are each demanding compensation of 300,000 Danish kroner (around 38,000 Swiss francs). The Danish government does not wish to comment on the claims until the results of the commission of inquiry are available.
29.08.2025, 21:36
