Denmark Issues Apology for Forcing IUDs on Young Greenlandic Girls

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Denmark’s prime minister has apologised to women who were victims of a decades-long involuntary birth control campaign, which has left islanders with deep scars and strained relations with their former colonial power.

Thousands of women and girls as young as 12 were fitted with intrauterine devices (IUDs) without their knowledge or consent between 1966 and 1991, the year Greenland was given authority over its healthcare system.

“I don’t believe we can achieve the more equal and proper relationship that many of us desire unless we dare opening even the darkest chapters,” Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, dressed all in black, said at a ceremony in Greenland’s capital Nuuk.

A woman in an all black outfit speaks at a podium as the audience listens. There's a woman standing amid the audience in a maroon dress holding a notepad with a sketch of a woman's body.

Between the late 1960s and 1992, Danish authorities aimed to reduce the Inuit birth rate by forcing around 4,500 women to wear an intrauterine device without their consent. Source: AP / Mads Claus Rasmussen

The ceremony marks another step in Denmark’s accelerated efforts to repair ties with Greenland, following United States President Donald Trump’s recent vows to assert control over the vast, resource-rich Arctic island for security reasons.

“Therefore, the apology I offer today is not only about the past. It is also about our present and our future. About the mutual trust that must exist between us,” Frederiksen told victims, some of whom wiped tears from their faces.

Physical and psychological scars

An investigation this month showed 4,070 women had been fitted with IUDs by the end of 1970 — roughly every second Greenlandic-born woman of childbearing age.

A large number of women reported debilitating abdominal pain and many have not been able to have children even after their device was removed, often due to severe infections.

“Receiving an apology does not mean that we accept what has happened. We are here today because we do not accept what has happened,” Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, who also wore black.

“But it is up to all of us to take the next steps,” Nielsen said.

Naja Lyberth, who leads a group of women that last year sought legal compensation from Denmark over the campaign, thanked Frederiksen for her apology, saying it created space for Greenlanders to work through their shared trauma.

“The state has now emphasised that we are equal souls within the Danish realm,” said Lyberth, who herself got an IUD aged 14.