“I had to spread my legs and when it was put in it hurt terribly,” said Britta Mortensen, who was 15 when she had an IUD or IUD put in.
Like thousands of young Greenlandic Inuit, she fell victim to policies to limit the birth rate in the arctic area, which by this time was no longer a colony but was still under Danish control.
Around 4,500 women underwent the procedure, according to an investigation by Danish public broadcaster DR.
It was 1974 and Mortensen had just left her family for the first time.
There was no high school in the fishing village of Ilulissat, where she lived on the western edge of the island, so it was an opportunity for her to continue her studies in Denmark.
“I… went to a boarding school and the principal told me, ‘You need to get an IUD.’ I said no,” she recalled as she stood in front of the white house where she was born.
The principal said, “‘Yes, you will get an IUD even if you say no,'” Mortensen added, the pain still evident.
Her parents, thousands of miles away, were never asked for their consent and never informed.
On an autumn day, the teenager found himself in front of a doctor willing to have the contraceptive put in.
“It was a spiral for women who already had children, not for young girls my age,” the 63-year-old told the AFP news agency.
– ‘Ashamed’ –
After the ‘assault’, Mortensen escaped into silence, unaware that her fate was being shared by other Greenlandic girls at their boarding school in Jutland, western Denmark.
“I was ashamed. I haven’t told anyone about it until now.”
But Mortensen is now joining a debate about what happened – albeit tentatively and mostly on Facebook, where a group set up by a psychologist who was also a victim has brought together more than 70 women.
It is a “mutually supportive group as fellow sisters so no one feels alone, especially with the reactivation of trauma that has been repressed for years,” said its creator, Naja Lyberth.
It’s especially taxing for women who haven’t been able to have children, she said.
Many women didn’t know they were wearing birth control, she added, and only found out when Greenlandic gynecologists started detecting it.
“Usually it was placed during an abortion without women being informed,” Lyberth told AFP.
Historian Soren Rud said the Danish campaign in the late 1960s was part of an ongoing colonial mentality that persisted even after formal decolonization in 1953.
This attitude “was shaped by ideas about the lack of cultural competence of the Greenlanders. Unlike many forms of contraception, the IUD required no effort from Greenlandic women to be effective,” said the associate professor at the University of Copenhagen.
The women’s testimonies come as Denmark and Greenland, which became an autonomous territory in 2009, are questioning their past relationship.
In March, Denmark apologized and paid compensation to six Inuit who were taken from their families in the 1950s to take part in an experiment to build a Danish-speaking elite in the Arctic.
Britta Mortensen believes that women who have been forced to use contraception also deserve an apology and should be compensated too.
“They should compensate for the harm that has been done to us, the many girls who have been forced to wear the IUD,” she said.
#Trauma #Greenlands #compulsory #contraception
