More than sixty of them have now asked the Danish government for compensation and are threatening to sue
67 Greenlandic Inuit women have demanded compensation of around 40,000 euros each from the Danish government for having a contraceptive implanted without their consent between the 1960s and 1970s, and they intend to sue him if he does not accept this. They are a small fraction of the thousands of women believed to have been caught up in the Danish government’s plan to restrict the native population of Greenland, a vast island that has been an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark since 1814.
The matter came to public attention six years ago when Naja Lyberth, one of the women now seeking to sue the government, publicly stated that she had been implanted with a contraceptive coil as a teenager after a doctor’s visit at school, without any explanation being given her what it was and without his parents’ consent. Lyberth and other women later had children, but for many involved this was not possible. In addition, there was hardly any cure in the following years: many women suffered from acute pain, internal bleeding and abdominal infections for years, and some had to undergo a hysterectomy.
Although Lyberth started talking about it several years ago, it was only in 2022 that the story came to the attention of the Danish public thanks to a podcast called Spiral Campaigns produced by Danish Public Television. IUD campaigns found, among other things, documents showing that around 4,500 Inuit IUDs were implanted between 1966 and 1970, about half of all fertile women in Greenland.
Now a group of women has demanded compensation from the Danish government of around 300,000 crowns, about 40,000 euros, for the damage caused by this practice, which is in addition to many other discriminatory measures that the Danish government took against women until a few years ago practiced decades ago. Natives of Greenland. In 1951, the Danish government took 22 Inuit children away from their families so that they could carry out a kind of social experiment. It was only in 2020 that the Danish authorities apologized to the Inuit community.
In 2022, following the publication of the Spiral Campaigns podcast, the Danish government and the Naalakkersuisut, the autonomous government of Greenland, set up an independent investigative commission to look into contraceptive practices practiced in Greenland between 1960 and 1991. Greenland gained control of its own Health system. After many delays, the commission began its work in May and is expected to publish its results in spring 2025.
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