Over the last several years, the reality of neo-colonialism – a top-down push by the elites at the United Nations, the European Union, and in many Western governments to reduce the populations of developing nations – has come into focus. Nigerian pro-life activist Obianuju Ekeocha has been exposing this agenda through her work, including her essential 2018 book Target Africa: Ideological Neo-Colonialism in the Twenty-First Century (you can listen to my interview about the book with her here) and her documentary Strings Attached.
Another chilling example of this neo-colonialism was recently reported by the BBC. Sixty-seven women from Greenland, a Danish colony until 1953 that is now semi-sovereign, are demanding compensation from the Danish government “over a campaign of involuntary birth control.” The campaign consisted of a concentrated attempt to reduce the birth rate among the Indigenous population in Greenland by inserting contraceptive devices into the bodies of women and girls without their consent or knowledge.
The details of this brutal campaign were exposed in a 2022 podcast produced by DR, the Danish broadcaster. A minimum of 4,500 women, some of them teenagers, had Intrauterine Devices (IUDs) put into their bodies between 1966 and 1970. The victims – some of them as young as 13 years old – were not aware that this was being done to them and did not consent to it. The scale of the campaign is staggering: The government of Greenland now “estimates that, by the end of 1969, 35% of women in the territory who could potentially have borne children had been fitted with an IUD.”
This eugenic drive to reduce the population of Indigenous people continued until at least 1975, but “the BBC has learned that it lasted for many years after that.” One woman, when struggling to conceive, discovered in 2009 that an IUD had been inserted into her body. Another woman – who is not named – told the BBC that she “had been injected with a contraceptive in 2014 without her consent.” In response to these revelations, the health minister of Greenland told the BBC that she did not now that “contraception was still being given to women without their consent.” Many medical professionals, in other words, are operating from a eugenic mindset rather than just eugenic policy.
Psychologist Naja Lyberth has now initiated a compensation claim against the Danish government on behalf of 67 women, some of whom are in their 70s and do not want to wait for a joint inquiry of Denmark and Greenland into the forced birth control campaign to complete in May 2025. “We don’t want to wait for the results of the inquiry,” Lyberth told the BBC. “We are getting older. The oldest of us, who had IUDs inserted in the 1960s, were born in the 1940s and are approaching 80. We want to act now. It’s already 100% clear that the government has broken the law by violating our human rights and causing us serious harm.” The 67 women are seeking 300,000 kroner – $42,150 – each.
That figure seems low considering what the government’s eugenic program took from them. According to Lyberth, in some cases “the devices fitted had been too big for the girls’ bodies, causing serious health complications or even infertility, while in others the women had been unaware of the devices until they were discovered recently by gynaecologists.” The claim has been sent to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen – Lyberth says that if it is denied or ignored, the next step will be to take the case to court. As the BBC pointed out, this isn’t the first compensation case Denmark has faced from Indigenous people: “Last year, Denmark apologised and paid compensation to six Inuit who were taken from their families in the 1950s as part of an attempt to build a Danish-speaking elite within Greenland.”
That these women should receive compensation is good and just. But it is important to remember that right now, the same practices are being perpetrated against women and girls across the developing world — contraceptives inserted without consent or informed consent; a push to limit or eliminate their fertility. We’ve gotten sneakier about our eugenics campaigns and we use different terminology, but it all amounts to the same thing.
