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Two investigations into the forced contraception of thousands of Indigenous Greenlandic women and girls reached sharply different conclusions over whether Denmark’s actions met the legal definition of genocide, with Greenland’s government rejecting the report that definitively ruled genocide out.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Greenland’s government has released two competing reports examining decades of forced contraception involving Indigenous women and girls, but accepted only the investigation that left open the possibility that the practice could constitute genocide under international law.
The findings, released Friday and reported by the Associated Press, center on what has become known as the “spiral case,” in which thousands of Greenlandic women and girls were fitted with intrauterine devices or given hormonal contraception, often without being fully informed or giving consent.
More than 350 Indigenous women and girls previously told investigators that Danish health authorities forcibly administered contraception to them. Some were 12 years old or younger.
Denmark has said more than 4,000 women and girls received IUDs between the 1960s and the mid-1970s, a figure reportedly representing roughly half of Greenland’s fertile female population at the time.
Many of the Inuit victims were teenagers. Women described being fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices, also known as IUDs or coils, or receiving hormonal birth-control injections without being adequately told what was being done or without consenting to the procedures.
The cases stretched from the 1960s into the early 1990s. Greenland assumed control of its own health care system on Jan. 1, 1992.
The stated rationale for the contraception program was to slow Greenland’s rapidly expanding population, which had grown as living standards and medical care improved.
The government-commissioned inquiry specifically instructed researchers to apply the definition contained in the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention. That convention includes among potentially genocidal acts “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
Despite that framework, Greenlandic officials declined during a Friday news conference to state whether they themselves had concluded that genocide occurred.
The controversy comes at a politically sensitive moment for Greenland, a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, as U.S. President Donald Trump continues pushing for American control of the Arctic island.
Greenlandic and Danish leaders have said Greenland is not for sale and that decisions about its future belong to Greenlanders.
Denmark has meanwhile taken steps toward compensation and reconciliation over the contraception program.
On Thursday, the Danish government approved payments of 300,000 Danish kroner, approximately $46,500, for each recognized victim.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen formally apologized last year.
Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen has also announced that a reconciliation commission will be established. Frederiksen endorsed that move in a statement Friday.
Authors split findings into two reports
The disagreement over whether the contraception practices legally constituted genocide ultimately divided the researchers themselves.
The inquiry had originally been intended to produce a single report. Several months ago, however, two of the four researchers broke away and completed a separate analysis.
That second report concluded unequivocally that genocide had not occurred.
“There is no empirical evidence to assume that any Danish or Greenlandic authority, or any individual healthcare professional, at any time had any intention of destroying the Greenlandic population or a significant proportion of it,” its authors wrote. “There was no genocide.”
Greenland’s government declined to accept that report after an expert review concluded that it did not satisfy recognized scientific standards.
One of the authors of the rejected report is a former director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
The report accepted by Greenland’s government did not reach the same definitive conclusion.
Its authors said the forced contraception cases alone did not provide enough evidence for them to determine whether authorities possessed the specific intent required to destroy all or part of Greenland’s Indigenous population.
Rather than declaring that genocide did or did not occur, they recommended broader examination of other Danish government policies from the same period, including practices involving Greenlandic children and families.
The accepted report also raised the possibility that a deliberate effort to sharply reduce the population of a particular ethnic group could potentially satisfy the intent element required under genocide law.
“It is difficult to imagine circumstances in which an attempt to substantially reduce the population of a single ethnic group could not constitute an intent to destroy, in part, that ethnicity,” the report said.
That left Greenland’s government with one report that explicitly rejected a genocide finding and another that said the available evidence was insufficient to resolve the question but did not rule genocide out.
The government accepted the latter.
Officials said disagreements among the researchers went beyond methodology.
“The reason given was professional disagreements amongst the members and, to some extent, concerns about the geopolitical situation,” the Greenlandic government said Friday in a news release.
The government did not elaborate on what geopolitical circumstances the two departing researchers had been concerned about.
The conflicting findings leave unresolved one of the most consequential questions surrounding the spiral case: whether a decades-long program aimed at restricting births among an Indigenous population amounted not only to systematic abuse and nonconsensual medical treatment, but to an act falling within the international legal definition of genocide.
For Greenland, the inquiry now moves forward alongside compensation payments, Denmark’s formal apology and plans for a reconciliation commission, while the legal and historical characterization of the contraception program remains contested.
Original article
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