Translated by Alessandra Fumagalli
Between the 60s and the 70s, Denmark put into action a limitation’s policy on Inuit births, implanting to thousands of young women birth control implants without their consent. Today, 67 of them claim for compensation of about 40 thousand euros each, due to the damage. The first woman to report these facts was Naja Lyberth, one of the victim of this policy when she was an adolescent and when, during a medical examination, she was implanted an IUD without neither her consent nor her parents’.
Inuits, known in Europe as “Eskimos”, lived and are still living in the arctic and antarctic regions of the planet. Nowadays, instead of “Eskimo”, that is is a dispregiative term because it means “those who eat raw meat”, they are called with the Inuit term, inuktitut, which means “population”. Nowadays, the Inuits represent 89% of the whole population of Greenland, that is about 57 thousand people. The Island, the biggest and the most northern area in the world, became part of the danish reign through the personal union in 1953. Thanks to this, Greenland and Denmark share the same President, even though they maintain institutional and government’s autonomy. The distance has always allowed these people to live almost isolated, till the arrival of the admiral’s barge of the last century. Since then, Denmark tried to “bring civilization to the Inuits, in order to let them survive as a population”, explained the Administration’s Departments of Greenland in 1952.
According to the national archives, the practical of installment without consent birth control implements led from 1966 to 1970 to the installment of more than 4500 IUD to young inuit women without their consent, with an amount of 35% of inuit women at the end of 1969. This practice, officially ended in 1975, lasted for several years. The implemented implants, in most cases, resulted too big for some women, who were usually little girls, causing them severe health problems, acute pains and internal bleedings and abdominal infections and, in some case, also infertility. Several women weren’t aware of these implants, as long as these implants were found by other gynecologists.
The story of Naja Lybert and of the other women undergoing this treatment came to light in 2022, thanks to Spiralkampagnen, the IUD Campaign, a podcast produce by the danish television. This campaign was able to find some documents linked to the program of the Danish government, whose aim was to limit births of the inuits in order to spare on the welfare. The campaign, defined as Danish Coil Campaign, led to the halving of the birth rate in Greenland. After the clamor raised by the awareness of these events, the Danish government set up an inquiry committee, in order to shed light on these events, that happened between 1960 and 1991, year when the sanitary system of the island became independent. The promise of Copenaghen is to publish the results of these inquires in 2025. Several victims of the campaign expressed their disappointment on the waiting times. Naja Lybert herself explained: “We are getting old, the oldest among us, that were already implemented in the 60s, were born in the 40s and are getting closer to 80 years old. We can no longer wait”.
In the last years, Denmark had to face some consequences of the limitation’s policies of the inuits, put in place last century. Last year, the government had to apologize and pay a compensation to 6 inuits that were taken away from their families in the 50s, as a part of a plan to build an élite of Danish speakers in Greenland. At that time, the project established the separation of 22 children between six and ten years old by the intuits families in order to be educated in Europe. The final aim was to facilitate the modernization of the Greenlandish society. Only 16 children of the 22 came back to Greenland the following year, because the others were adopted by Danish families. When they returned, they were obliged to live in a orphanage to safeguard the learned habits and language in Denmark. This brought to a strong estrangement of the children, not only from their culture, but also from the families and communities. As it happens to the women who were implements IUD, the children that took part into the experiment were unaware of the real reason why they were separated by their families. These facts emerged during some researches in the national archive.
Sources used for this article:
https://www.internazionale.it/ultime-notizie/2023/10/03/groenlandia-danimarca-donne-risarcimenti
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66990670#
https://www.storicang.it/a/lotta-perenne-degli-inuit-per-sopravvivere_15037
https://www.ilpost.it/2020/12/09/groenlandia-danimarca-bambini-inuit/
https://www.ilpost.it/2023/10/02/donne-groenlandia-danimarca-diritti-riproduttivi/
https://www.groenlandia.it/articoli/inuit-le-popolazioni-del-nord-della-terra
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Mondo Internazionale APS - Riproduzione Riservata ® 2023
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L'Autore
Chiara Giovannoni
Chiara Giovannoni, classe 2000, è laureata in Scienze Internazionali e Diplomatiche all’Università di Bologna. Attualmente frequenta il corso di laurea magistrale in Strategie Culturali per la Cooperazione e lo sviluppo presso l’Università Roma3.
Interessata alle relazioni internazionali, in particolare alla dimensione dei diritti umani e alla cooperazione.
E’ volontaria presso un’organizzazione no profit che si occupa dei diritti dei minori in varie aree del mondo.
In Mondo Internazionale ricopre la carica di autrice per l’area tematica Diritti Umani.
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Inuit Contraccezione Senza Consenso danimarca Groenlandia