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- By Levi Rickert
Guest Opinion. Denmark is the architect of a campaign to stop the births of Inuit people in Greenland from the 1960s to as recently as 1991. When Greenland took over health care from Denmark, it became responsible for another 15 cases since 1992, and authorities have continued to receive reports as recently as 2022. The Danish Institute of Human Rights claims it is still happening.
In 1966, the Danish government launched a birth control campaign that involved inserting IUDs in Greenlandic women. Within the first four years, 4,500 women had been fitted with coils. By 1969, the government estimated that 35% of women of reproductive age in Greenland had received an IUD, and the number of births had begun to decline.
In October 2023, 67 women—and then 143 women by March 2024—filed a lawsuit against Denmark and Greenland for sterilization without their consent, asking for $44,000 (300,000 kroner) in compensation for each victim. They are referred to as the “spiral cases.”
Before we start pointing fingers, we have to acknowledge that the U.S. was engaged in forced sterilizations of Native women from 1960 to as late as 1980 through the Indian Health Service, the official U.S. government health care provider for Native Americans. The U.S. has yet to acknowledge this or pay compensation to the victims. But there is more. Australia has acknowledged its campaign of forced sterilization of Aboriginal women during that same time period. Canada started forced sterilization in 1928 and passed specific laws resulting in the sterilization of Indigenous women until the 1970s.
In 1950, Denmark also abducted children from Greenland and brought them to Denmark to try to “turn them into Danes.” If this sounds familiar, the U.S. engaged in a massive residential school program from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s to assimilate American Indian children by abducting them from their reservations and separating them from their families. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs recently completed a survey and report on the extent of this experiment and its damages. Canada also engaged in the same type of residential school programs and “apologized” through a kind of truth and reconciliation commission.
Who Owns Greenland?
Columbus asked the Pope much the same question about America in 1492, from which the Doctrine of Discovery sprang. The discoverer was said to have the right to the land, but there was a recognized right of occupancy by the Indigenous people, with whom a fair exchange for the land should be made. (We know how that turned out.) Yet the Doctrine of Discovery was adopted by the United States Supreme Court in 1823 and became the foundation of property law in America.
But in what I can only call a repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, Trump put it this way: just because they “had a boat that landed there [Greenland] 500 years ago doesn’t mean they own the land.”
The Greenland population is 88.9% Inuit, made up of three ethnic groups: the Kalaallit to the west (who speak Kalaallisut); the Tunumiit to the east (who speak Tunumiit oraasiat); and the Inughuit to the north (who speak Inuktun).
Greenland became a colony of Denmark in the 1700s, and in 1953 it formally became part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Denmark began providing better schools, housing, and health care, but by the 1960s it determined it had been too successful. The birth survival rate had increased, and so had the population. So Denmark decided to reverse that trend to reduce costs and engaged in an unscrupulous, involuntary forced sterilization program.
Regional Governance: The Arctic Council and NGOs
The predominant intergovernmental body in the Arctic is the Arctic Council, made up of eight nations: Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden, and the United States. All members must have some land-based presence in the Arctic Circle. Eighty percent of Greenland is above the Arctic Circle.
The Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) is a non-governmental organization representing the interests of Inuit from Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Chukotka (Russia), and also serves on the Arctic Council as a permanent participant. It is comparable to the role that the National Congress of American Indians plays on behalf of Native American tribes. The ICC established the Pikialasorsuaq Commission for consultation on common interests around the North Water Polynya.
So while Greenland is a semi-autonomous region of Denmark, it is still protected by international conventions on human rights, including the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, there is no international law requiring compensation for violations of these rights. Countries have to do the right thing.
Offers of Compensation
In September 2025, the long-awaited investigation found that 350 Greenlandic Indigenous women and girls, some as young as 12, were forcibly given contraception using IUDs by health authorities.
In December 2025, Denmark agreed to provide compensation of $46,000 to women who were victims of this program between 1960 and 1991. They can apply for individual payouts of 300,000 Danish kroner beginning in April 2026 and have until June 2028 to apply. A deal was reached, according to media sources, likely driven by the lawsuit filed on behalf of the victims and the damning results of the investigation.
The health minister, Sophie Løhde, said in a statement:
The IUD case is a dark chapter in our shared history. It has had major consequences for the Greenlandic women who have experienced both physical and psychological harm. Unfortunately, we cannot remove the pain from the women, but compensation helps to acknowledge and apologize for the experiences they have gone through.
The damage can never be reversed, and the payouts are far from adequate. But this was a step in the right direction—and the right thing to do.
To read more articles by Professor Sutton go to: https://profvictoria.substack.
Professor Victoria Sutton (Lumbee) is a law professor on the faculty of Texas Tech University. In 2005, Sutton became a founding member of the National Congress of American Indians, Policy Advisory Board to the NCAI Policy Center, positioning the Native American community to act and lead on policy issues affecting Indigenous communities in the United States.
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