At the end of the 1960s, Denmark had an IUD laid to many Greenlanders, including minor, without their consent. The victims are claiming reparation today. The government has just agreed to open an investigation.
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Naja Lyberth was 14 years old. It was in 1976. She lived in Manitsoq, a small island west of Greenland. The day after a medical visit to school, the teenager and her classmates were sent to the hospital: we were going to put a IUD. His parents were not informed. For the girl, refusing was not an option. At 60, this psychologist in Nuuk, the capital of the Danish autonomous province, still remembers the heartbreaking pain, when the IUD entered its uterus. The suffering would return every month, at the time of its rules.
During the intervention, Naja Lyberth had never had sex. “The state stole my virginity,” she confided, in June 2021, to the Groenland women magazine Arnanut. In the article, another woman testifies. How many have they had suffered the same test? The newspaper delivers a dizzying figure: between 1966 and 1970, 4,500 intrauterine devices (IUD) were placed on Greenlandic women and adolescent girls. However, at that time, they were 9,000 in age to have children, throughout the archipelago.
Discovering the article, journalists Anne Pilegaard Petersen and Celine Klint, in Copenhagen, decide to investigate, surprised by the little information around this subject. Like Naja Lyberth, they wonder: why so many Greenlanders, some of whom were very young has been imposed on a IUD without the consent of their parents? Who had decided so? And with what agenda? In a podcast posted online in early May on the site of the public audiovisual group DR, Anne Pilegaard Petersen and Celine Klint lift the veil on one of the forgotten chapters of the colonial history of Denmark: the “Sterilet Campaign”.
Modernization with forced march
Since Naja testified, very many other victims came out of silence. Some have never been able to have children, after various infections caused – they are convinced of them – by the IUD. Others, ignoring that we had put an IUD with them, discovered him for years later. Have they repressed the memory of the visit to the hospital and the insertion, in their entrails, of this means of contraception? The fact remains that doctors have long continued to discover the presence in the uterus of their patients. The latter were going to consult because they did not manage to get pregnant.
“Women in this case were not numerous, but nonetheless enough for all gynecologists who have exercised here,” said Aviaja Siegstad, practitioner at the Queen Hospital Ingrid in Nuuk, at the Groenland chain Knr. Like her colleagues, she assumed that some gynecologists were responsible, individually.
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