Greenland's IUD Scandal: Denmark Is Now Paying the Women It Wronged

Some of them were 12 or 13 years old. They were called out of school, taken to a doctor, and fitted with a contraceptive coil. Many weren't told what was being done to them. Some only found out years later, when a doctor discovered a device they never knew was there.

The viral post says Denmark will compensate thousands of Inuit women and girls in Greenland who were forced to have IUDs inserted without their consent. That's accurate, and the story has already moved further than the post suggests. Denmark passed the compensation law in August 2026, and the first women were paid in September.

Here is what happened, what Denmark has admitted, and what the women are actually getting.

Photo: Oliver Schauf / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

What became known as the "spiral case"

Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953, and Denmark kept control of its health system until 1992. In the 1960s, as better healthcare and living conditions sent Greenland's population climbing, Danish health authorities began fitting large numbers of Greenlandic women and girls with intrauterine devices, called "spirals" in Danish because of their coiled shape.

The scale was enormous for such a small population. An independent investigation commissioned by the Danish and Greenlandic governments and published in September 2025 found that by the end of 1970, at least 4,070 Greenlandic women and girls had an IUD, roughly every second woman born in Greenland. It couldn't say how many of those were fitted without consent; after 1970 the way the statistics were kept changed, and the total number of IUDs inserted is unknown.

What the investigation could document was the testimony. Some 354 women came forward to describe their experiences, including girls 12 years old and younger. Many said they were never properly told what was being done or asked for their consent. Some have described years of pain, complications and lost fertility.

The activist and trauma therapist Naja Lyberth told the BBC she was about 13 when a coil was fitted in 1975. Like many women, she said she had blocked the memory until she confronted it as an adult. The practice did not stop neatly in 1992, either: some women have reported involuntary contraception after Greenland took over its own health system, and Greenland has set up its own compensation scheme for those later cases.

The apology

For years, Danish governments avoided a formal reckoning. That changed in 2025. In late August, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen issued a written apology on behalf of Denmark, and on September 24 she traveled to Nuuk to deliver it in person alongside Greenland's premier, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, at the Katuaq cultural center.

Photo: ThatGuyOnline / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The money: who gets what

An apology without redress had been criticized as hollow, and a group of 143 women had already sued the Danish state, demanding 300,000 Danish kroner each for violating their human rights. In December 2025 the government and a broad majority in parliament agreed to give every eligible woman exactly that amount.

The law was passed by the Danish parliament on August 27, 2026. Here is how it works:

Applications opened on July 1, 2026, even before the law formally took effect on September 1. On September 4, Denmark's broadcaster DR reported that the first four women had been awarded compensation, and that at least 342 had applied so far. Officials expect that number to grow considerably. Teams are traveling to towns in Greenland and to Greenlandic community houses in Denmark to help women apply.

The question compensation doesn't settle

Money was never the whole demand. Some Greenlanders and campaigners have argued that a policy designed to limit the birth rate of an Indigenous people amounted to genocide. In August 2026, two expert reports on that question were published. As reported by the BBC and AP, the experts found that the rights of Greenlandic women had been violated, but said they could not conclude that genocide had occurred on the basis of the contraceptive practices alone, while leaving open that a court might reach a different finding using wider evidence. Greenland's government said the debate was not over and announced a reconciliation commission.

Other critics, including human rights scholars writing in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, argue that payments to individual women can't repair the wider, collective harm to Inuit families and communities. Those debates will continue. But for women who spent decades being disbelieved, a state that once fitted them with coils without asking is now, finally, writing them checks and saying sorry in their own capital.

Read next: A top Tokyo medical school rigged its exams for a decade to keep women out · How Gina Martin made upskirting a crime in 18 months · The Navajo First Laugh Ceremony