This episode originally ran on Friday 19 April 2024
Bula Larsen was 14 when one day she and her friends were told to go to the hospital. Bula lived in Greenland and was Inuit like most of the population of the island, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark. At the hospital she and her friends lined up, and one by one were told to enter a room. Bula recalls how she was asked to sit on a bed with “cold metal stirrups” where, to her shock, she was fitted with an IUD, a contraceptive coil she had never asked for or agreed to have.
Today, more than 100 women are suing the Danish government for a policy of forced contraception. Helen Pidd hears how thousands of Inuit women and girls – some aged just 13 – were fitted with coils. Many say this was done without their or their parents’ consent, and caused lasting damage.
Celine Klint is a Danish journalist whose work on the coil scandal, along with her colleague Anne Pilegaard Petersen, revealed there had been a Danish policy to reduce Greenland’s birthrate to cut the amount of money that had to be spent on the region.
Now the women are suing the government and an inquiry is under way. Will they get justice?
