In the 1960s and 1970s, Danish doctors inserted IUDs into thousands of women and girls in Greenland, often without consent.
Dozens a group of Greenlandic women is seeking compensation from the Danish government for the birth control program that the country implemented in Greenland in the 1960s and 1970s. This is reported by the British Broadcasting Company BBC.
Representatives of the Danish and Greenlandic governments have established an investigative team to investigate a birth control program in which Danish doctors inserted IUDs into thousands of Inuit women and girls – often without their consent. The goal of the program was to slow down the growth of Greenland’s indigenous population.
The investigative team is scheduled to finish its work in 2025, but 67 women have already decided to apply for compensation before then.
Application started by a psychologist Naja Lyberth, who was fitted with an IUD at the age of 14 without consent. According to him, some women do not want to wait for the outcome of the investigation.
“We are getting older. The oldest of us had an IUD installed in the 1960s. They were born in the 1940s and are approaching eighty. We want to act now,” he says, according to the BBC.
The compensation application was sent to the Prime Minister of Denmark For Mette Frederiksen on Monday. The claimed amount of compensation is 300,000 Danish kroner, or about 40,220 euros per woman.
Lyberth says that he believes that the government will not agree to the request to pay compensation before the conclusion of the investigation. According to him, the group of women who applied for compensation plans to take the case to court if necessary.
of Denmark the extent of the decades-old prevention program was revealed last year.
Spiralkampagnenpodcast, the IUD was installed in up to 4,500 Inuit women and girls between 1966 and 1970. Greenland’s administration has estimated that by 1969, 35 percent of women of childbearing age in the region had an IUD installed.
The procedures were often traumatic and painful. There are also cases where the woman did not know about the existence of the IUD.
The youngest girls were only 12 years old when the IUD was installed. According to Naja Lyberth, in some cases the IUDs were too large for the girls’ bodies and caused serious health problems or infertility.
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