Naja Lyberth and her fellow fighters don't want to wait any longer. For decades, they have kept silent, convinced that they were alone, consumed by the same "sense of shame and guilt" that consumes victims of sexual violence. On Monday, October 2, 67 of them sent a letter to the Danish government, demanding 300,000 kroner (around €40,000 euros) each in compensation for what the state did to them.
The scandal broke in the spring of 2022. A year earlier, 60-year-old psychologist Lyberth had spoken about her experience to the Greenlandic women's magazine Arnanut. She recounted the day in 1976 when she and her schoolmates from Maniitsoq, a small island in western Greenland, were sent to hospital. There, a Danish doctor had fitted them with an intrauterine device (IUD), without even consulting their parents. Lyberth was 14. She had never had sexual intercourse. She still remembers the pain she felt when the IUD entered her vagina, then her uterus.
"The state stole my virginity," was the accusation she made in the article, in which another woman gave a similar account. At the time, Lyberth thought there were only a few of them. In Greenland, silence reigned. "The subject was taboo," she said. Some didn't even know they were wearing an IUD, and only discovered it years later when they went to see a gynecologist because they couldn't get pregnant.
After reading the article, two Danish journalists, Anne Pilegaard Petersen and Celine Klint, decided to investigate. They discovered that the IUD operation was in fact part of a campaign by Copenhagen to "modernize" Greenland, which became a Danish province in 1953, rather than a colony. At the time, the archipelago had one of the highest birth rates in the world. In 1964, 1,674 births were recorded for a population of 37,600. This demographic explosion was costing Denmark dearly.
Widespread use of contraception was presented as the solution to all problems, including women's freedom. Between 1966 and 1970, Danish doctors fitted 4,500 IUDs. There were 9,000 women of childbearing age. According to Lyberth, the fate of Greenland’s women was of little importance: "In Denmark, parents had to give their consent for a doctor to insert an IUD on a minor, but this was not the case in Greenland. And while Danish women had a choice of contraceptives, we were forced to use a model that had been known since 1968 to be unsuitable for women who had never given birth."
The campaign was effective. By 1970, the birth rate had almost halved. But women were suffering. Many faced complications, forcing some to have their uterus removed. "A number [of them] had ectopic pregnancies or were never able to get pregnant," revealed Lyberth, who eventually had a son at the age of 35.
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