Denmark’s prime minister apologised in person on Wednesday to Greenland women who were the unwitting victims of a 25-year-long involuntary birth control campaign carried out by the former colonial power.
Between 1966 and 1991 – the year Greenland was given control of the island’s healthcare system – thousands of women and girls, some as young as 12, were fitted with intrauterine devices (IUDs) without their knowledge or consent.
“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,” Danish PM Mette Frederiksen said in a show of remorse in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.
Addressing the victims, many of them tearful, PM Frederiksen, who was dressed in black, stressed that “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.”
The ceremony marked the latest move by Denmark to mend ties with Greenland, its former colony, at a time when the authorities are all too aware of U.S. President Donald Trump‘s security-driven eagerness to acquire control of the resource-rich Arctic Island.
This month, an investigation revealed that 4,070 women had been involuntarily fitted with IUDs by the end of 1970 – roughly every second Greenlandic-born woman of childbearing age. Of these, a large number reported suffering debilitating abdominal pain. Many were unable 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 for the occasion, declared. “But it is up to all of us to take the next steps.”
