Two reports investigating the forcible contraception of thousands of Indigenous women and girls in Greenland by Danish health authorities for decades were split over whether the practice constituted genocide.
The Greenlandic government, which commissioned the inquiry, released the reports Friday but, when pressed by journalists during a news conference, would not say whether its leaders concluded whether a genocide had occurred. The government told the authors to use the definition under the United Nations’ 1948 genocide convention, which includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
Known as the “spiral case, " the revelations have rocked both Denmark and Greenland. More than 350 Greenlandic Indigenous women and girls, including some 12 years old and younger, previously came forward to investigators and reported that they were forcibly given contraception by Danish health authorities. Denmark says more than 4,000 women and girls — reportedly half the fertile women in Greenland at the time — received IUDs between the 1960s and mid-1970s.
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