Thousands of women in Greenland, including some as young as 12, have had an intrauterine contraceptive device (known as an IUD or coil) implanted, often without their consent, as part of a Danish campaign to control Greenland’s growing Inuit population in the 60s and 70s.
The Danish government announced that it will carry out an independent investigation into the so-called “Spiral Campaign”.
However, the BBC has collected accounts from women describing involuntary methods of contraception recentamid growing calls for the investigation to be more thorough and span a longer period of time.
When Bebiane was 21, she went to have an IUD inserted, only to hear the shocking news that she already had one inside.
“I remember tears rolling down my cheeks, and I told them I couldn’t understand how I already had an IUD in it. How could I not remember when they put it in?”
Bebiane believes that the only time she could have had a coil inserted without her knowledge was when she had a miscarriage at age 16, in the early 1990s. 2000.
For the next four years, he suffered bouts of crippling abdominal pain so severe that they left her unable to climb stairs.
“I went to the hospital so many times and they didn’t know what was wrong with me… [El dolor] She came when she had her period, but also when she didn’t”.
She wanted to get pregnant, but had not conceived after more than a year.
“Every time I had my period…I would cry,” Bebiane tells me.
She decided to take a break from trying for a few months and get an IUD, as her friends had wrongly advised her that it would increase her fertility.
That’s when he discovered he already had one in place.
She had it removed, abandoned plans to put on a new one, and got pregnant within a few months.
recent experience
Mira’s (not her real name) experience is even more recent. In 2019, she discovered that she had an IUD when a doctor found it during a medical exam.
“I was so surprised,” she says.
The only time it could have been inserted without her knowledge, Mira thinks, would have been during a minor uterine surgery she had in 2018.
Mira suffered severe pain for a year after surgery. She says her doctor paid no attention to her pain until a full checkup revealed that she had an IUD.
Mira, who is now 45 years old, says that the doctor told her that the coil had perforated uterus.
Exhausted by medical complications that she believes were caused by the IUD, she opted to have her entire uterus removed.
But Mira says that the operation was not a success: she can’t have sex anymore because every time she does it causes more bleeding and excruciating pain.
Injections and subdermal implants
The IUD is not the only contraceptive device that appears to have been inserted into some women in the Greenland population without their knowledge.
Annita (not her real name) woke up from an abortion in 2011 with what she describes as a “limping feeling” in her arm, which she saw was covered by a bandage.
After asking the Danish doctor about it, he explained that it was a birth control implanta small flexible plastic rod that is placed under the skin in the upper arm.
Annita, now 31, says the doctor explained that the implant had been placed because it was her fourth miscarriage.
“It was so horrible…he really crossed the line,” she tells me. “I felt violated.”
She demanded that it be removed, but he was reluctant to do so, Annita says. It was only when she began to rip off the bandage, threatening to remove the implant herself, that the doctor agreed to remove it.
Saara, 28, another name we have changed, says she, too, regained consciousness after an operation to make a shocking discovery.
Era 2014 and had been put under general anesthesia for a procedure after a miscarriage, but she woke up to a Danish nurse who injected the contraceptive Depo Provera.
“I didn’t know what it was and she didn’t ask me if I wanted it,” she tells me, “just that I should go back to the hospital to get the injection every three months.”
Saara says that the nurse didn’t even tell her the name of the drug. And once she found out, she had to search the internet for more information.
Saara decided to continue using it for a few years, but says that when she stopped taking the drug so she and her husband could have a baby, it took her several years to get pregnant.
She adds that it had not been explained to her that Depo Provera could affect her menstrual cycle for up to 12 months after her last injection.
limited research
In September, Denmark and Greenland agreed to launch a two-year investigation to establish what happened. until 1991when Greenland took control of its health system from Denmark.
But the women I spoke to say their relatively recent experiences suggest that the term is too limited.
“I would like the investigation not to end in 1991 and that the investigation into the provision of contraceptives to women without their consent continues to this day,” says Bebiane.
Mira says she knows of other women this has happened to.
Greenland’s Health Minister Mimi Karlsen told the BBC she was not aware of more recent cases of women receiving contraceptives without informed consent.
“If there has been a practice by individuals… that is against the law and ethics and care in general, that is of course something we need to react to.”
To determine an appropriate course of action, Karlsen said he would forward the BBC’s findings to the national board of health and chief medical officer for a full assessment of the cases and to clarify whether the problem is widespread and connected to historical policies.
Campaign
Naja Lybeth is one of the women forcibly coiled as part of the Danish campaign, in her case, in 1975.
“I was about 13 years old. I felt like I had been stabbed with knives,” he says.
Her school friend Holga, now 62, was 14 when she got it.
“I blocked out so many things,” she says, “but I will always remember the pain. I was in so much pain for many years.”
An early version of the IUD called Lippes Loop. It had been designed for adults who had already gone through childbirth, but was inserted in girls as young as 12 years old.
“I can’t imagine the pain you would feel if this was placed in a small cavity,” says gynecologist Aviaja Siegstad as she shows me a model of a young woman’s uterus next to a Lippes Loop.
Complications arising from the placement of the Lippes Loop in girls and young women ranged from severe bleeding to infection, persistent pain and infertility.
As recently as the mid-1990s, Dr. Siegstad found IUDs in patients being evaluated for infertility.
“They didn’t know they had it,” he says. “They had been trying to get pregnant for 10 to 15 years without knowing what the problem was.”
Naja, who works as a trauma therapist, says that the fact that the experience of having the IUD was harrowing for some people, coupled with the lack of basic information, meant that many women like her had blocked the experience from memory.
“I’m part of a generation of traumatized women. The consequences were just too much to handle. It’s like we collectively forgot about each other,” she says.
In fact, Naja – who is in the BBC list of top 100 women inspirational and influential from around the world this year – says she herself only faced the memory when she began working with personal trauma as part of her instruction.
She began reaching out to other women through Facebook to find out who else had experienced something similar. In the years that followed, some 200 people from across Greenland responded to her post to say yes. She now campaigns for the rights of other women affected by the scandal.
But it wasn’t until a Danish podcast about the scandal aired earlier this year that the scale of the campaign was revealed. This sparked a national outcry.
The podcast, called Spiralkampagnen (“Spiral Campaign”), found records indicating that even 4,500 women and girls had the LIppes Loop implanted in Greenland between 1966 and 1970.
That was about half of the 9,000 women of childbearing age living in the country at the time.
“Success”
The campaign was designed to control population growth in Greenland, which had skyrocketed since the 1950s, with the help of modernization and better health care. This growth, in addition to an increasing rate of teenage pregnancy, had alarmed the Danish authorities.
In 1970, the campaign was considered a “success” as fertility rates had fallen dramatically, and the rate continued to fall for some time after that.
In the eight years from the start of the campaign in 1966 to 1974, when it leveled off, Greenland’s fertility rate plummeted from seven children per woman to 2.3.
Magnus Heunicke, Denmark’s acting health minister, says that there are no records of when the campaign was stoppedso discovering it is one of the goals of current research.
“What I fear is that it could have been something that went on for decades,” he told me.
After years of pain, Naja had her IUD removed at the age of 17. She finally managed to have a child at age 35 after several years of trying to conceive.
As for her friend Holga, she says that she visited the doctor many times afterwards because of the pain and, later, because of the difficulties in getting pregnant. She adds that she was told repeatedly that nothing was wrong, but she was never examined.
She can’t remember exactly at what age the coil was finally discovered and removed, but she never managed to have a child.
Holga had her uterus removed in 2018 on the advice of her doctor, due to various complications as a result of the Lippes Loop.
forced abortion
The most striking historical case I found was that of Susanne Kielsen, now 75 years old.
After a routine checkup when she was five months pregnant with her second child, the doctor told her that he wanted to abort the baby because of a previous gynecological complication.
She says the “complication” had been addressed before the pregnancy and she was in good health. However, she says, the doctors went ahead and induced an abortion, which required no fewer than 31 injections, but the baby did not die.
Finally, at seven months, she went into labor and her baby died at birth. Within hours, she says there were four attempts to insert an IUD before she finally demanded the doctor stop.
She says she used to imagine hearing the baby, who she later learned was a toddler, crying in her house.
“My sadness just gets the better of me.”
Susanne says she wants one apology from the Danish authorities before it is too late.
Photos and drawings: by Elaine Jung.