Two separate reports investigating decades of forced contraception imposed on Indigenous women and girls in Greenland by Danish health authorities have reached different conclusions on whether the practice amounted to genocide.
Greenland’s government, which ordered the inquiry, released both reports on Friday but declined to say outright whether officials believe genocide occurred. Investigators were instructed to apply the definition set out in the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention, which covers “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
The findings arrive as U.S. President Donald Trump continues pushing to gain control of Greenland, a self-governing Danish territory. Leaders in both Nuuk and Copenhagen maintain the island is not for sale and that its future is for Greenlanders alone to decide.
Referred to as the “spiral case,” the scandal has shaken both countries. More than 350 Indigenous women and girls — some as young as 12 — have told investigators they were fitted with contraceptive devices without their knowledge or consent. Denmark estimates over 4,000 women and girls, reportedly about half the fertile female population of Greenland at the time, received IUDs between the 1960s and mid-1970s. Victims say they were given IUDs or hormonal birth control injections without being told what the procedures involved.
The practice reportedly aimed to slow Greenland’s population growth at a time when better living conditions and health care were driving rapid increases. The cases span from the 1960s into the early 1990s; Greenland assumed control of its own health care system on January 1, 1992.
Denmark’s government approved compensation of 300,000 kroner (about $46,500) per victim this past Thursday, following an official apology last year from Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen announced plans for a reconciliation commission, which Frederiksen backed in a statement Friday.
Two Reports, Two Conclusions
Greenland’s government said it accepts only one of the two reports, arguing that the other — which flatly concluded no genocide took place — failed to meet recognized scientific standards. That rejected report’s authors wrote there was no evidence any Danish or Greenlandic authority intended to destroy the Greenlandic population, in whole or in part.
The report Greenland’s government did accept stopped short of a firm conclusion either way, saying the forced-contraception cases alone weren’t enough to establish intent to destroy the population, and calling for further research into other Danish policies affecting Greenlandic children and families at the time. Unlike the rejected report, it did not rule out genocide, stating: “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 two reports were originally meant to be published as one document, but two of the four researchers broke off months ago to write their own version — the one Greenland’s government has now rejected. One of its authors previously directed the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Greenland’s government said the split stemmed from professional disagreements among the researchers and, in part, concerns tied to the broader geopolitical situation, without elaborating further.
