Denmark apologises to Greenland's forced contraception victims

[IwantToRetire]

Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has issued a long-awaited apology to the Greenlandic women and their families affected by what she called "systematic discrimination" during a contraceptive campaign.

Records from the national archives showed that, between 1966 and 1970, 4,500 women and girls, some as young as 13, had an IUD implanted.

Of these, it is unclear how many cases lacked consent. However, dozens of women have come forward sharing traumatic personal accounts and some were left sterile.

A group of 143 women have since filed a lawsuit against the Danish state demanding compensation:138 of them were under 18 at the time.

Use of the birth control was so widespread that Greenland's population growth severely slowed.

Full article https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yelp5466no

How shocking! Forced adoptions as well!
Racism and xenophobia have never made sense to me, it's literally not logical to treat one group of humans in a more derogatory way than another. Sexism is the same - not logical.

I'm a Danish citizen and heard the podcast. I haven't yet been able to forget it. Particularly the interview with a Dr who inserted some of the iuds. There was a very long silence when she was told that they hadn't consented - they'd been told to show up at the clinic but not told why.

Is it very believable that the doctor inserting the IUD didn't know what was going on?

I'm not a doctor or a nurse but if I were and I was fitting IUDs I would expect the patients to know what was going on.

Surely if they all seemed completely confused and didn't behave as though they knew roughly what to expect, you'd smell a rat? Particularly if they were all from the same minority group and some of them were stil minors.

4,500 women and girls is an even more horrific number if we remember that even today the total population of Greenland is only about 55,000. This is the kind of thing China does with unruly minorities like the Uighurs.

I hope this causes some reflection. Greenland might have devolved government now, and even talk of independence, but for a very long time it was run like a giant version of the native reservations in the US or Canada, with all the usual problems of rampant alcoholism, DV and suicide. It doesn't fit well with Denmark's self-image as a nice progressive country.

This was a horrific attempt at ethnic cleansing by scientific means. It caused the birthrate in Greenland to drop by half.

*Is it very believable that the doctor inserting the IUD didn't know what was going on?

I'm not a doctor or a nurse but if I were and I was fitting IUDs I would expect the patients to know what was going on.*

Sadly, plausible. You're looking at it with a 21stC view. In the 60s medicine was authoritarian. Patient consent was not as important as the doctor's belief in what they were doing. Doctors would tell the patient what they thought the patient ought to know, and often be more explicit to the patient's family. Patients did not even have any right to know the details of their treatment - that was confidential communication between professionals.

So it seems to me quite plausible that doctors would not question the fact that a patient was ignorant of what was going to happen to them. It even that the doctor, being part of an authoritarian establishment, might not question the practice of sterilising women.

I'm surprised it has taken this long to apologise.

I can remember it being in the news some years ago (according to wikipedia 2017). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_case

But seems, as usual those with power never want to admit they might have played a part in inflecting unacceptable actions of groups of people they despise. (It wasn't until then that I only found out that it was treated as a colony.)

And how sadly individually for all the women this was done to.

It's utterly heartbreaking.

It looks as though the formal apology was only made today. (?)

https://www.channel4.com/news/denmark-apology-for-forced-contraception-of-inuit-women-in-greenland

Apologies tend to have to be wrung out of colonising powers are often not universally approved of e.g. 'Why should we apologising - we didn't do it, it was a past generation.. you can't hold a whole nation responsible...is [insert other country] going to apologise for [insert other atrocity]?'

In fairness, 55 years isn't very long, in the grand scheme of former colonial powers acknowledging their crimes.

They need to stop removing children from those who have an indigenous first language as well.

What an amazing coincidence that they happened to apologise just as Greenlanders start to debate independence and / or joining the USA.

In fairness, 55 years isn't very long, in the grand scheme of former colonial powers acknowledging their crimes.

How true.

And then of course even within a single country such as the UK, it takes decades.

More than decades - it took 150 years before the UK officially acknowledged - but did not apologise for - their role in the Great Hunger in 19th century Ireland.

I remember reading about this in 2017.

Thanks for the update.

Yes, I was reading Theodore Dalrymple the other day (doctor turned conservative commentator) and he was arguing that the new patient-centric model of communication makes treatment slower & less effective. He had some points, but I strongly believe that there are huge downsides to the old model, and that women, who are more agreeable on average for both social & biological reasons, were particularly ill-served by it.

This is another example of how Denmark's colonial attituded to Greenland directly impacted women, in a tragic way.

When Keira's daughter was born last November, she was given two hours with her before the baby was taken into care.

babies and children were taken away after parental competency tests - known in Denmark as FKUs - were used to help assess whether they were fit to be parents.

In May this year the Danish government banned the use of these tests on Greenlandic families after decades of criticism, although they continue to be used on other families in Denmark.

The assessments, which usually take months to complete, are used in complex welfare cases where authorities believe children are at risk of neglect or harm.

Greenlandic parents in Denmark are 5.6 times more likely to have children taken into care than Danish parents, according to the Danish Centre for Social Research, a government-funded research institute.
In May, the government said it hoped in due course to review around 300 cases – including ones involving FKU tests – in which Greenlandic children were forcibly removed from their families.

But as of October, the BBC found that just 10 cases where parenting tests were used had been reviewed by the government - and no Greenlandic children had been returned as a result.

Full article https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1wlw2qj113o

Theres already a thread on that https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/feminism/5397520-newborn-baby-confiscated-when-mother-fails-competency-test