NUUK, Greenland — Two reports investigating the forcible contraception of thousands of Indigenous women and girls in Greenland by Danish health authorities for decades were split over whether the practice constituted genocide.
The Greenlandic government, which commissioned the inquiry, released the reports Friday but, when pressed by journalists during a news conference, would not say whether its leaders had concluded whether a genocide had occurred. The government told the authors to use the definition under the United Nations’ 1948 genocide convention, which includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
The reports come as President Trump pushes to control the Arctic island, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark. The leaders of Greenland and Denmark say the island is not for sale and only Greenlanders can decide their fate.
Known as the “spiral case,” the revelations have rocked both Denmark and Greenland. More than 350 Greenlandic Indigenous women and girls, including some 12 years old and younger, previously came forward to investigators and reported that they were forcibly given contraception by Danish health authorities.
The Inuit victims, many of them teenagers at the time, said they were either fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices, known as IUDs or coils, or given a hormonal birth control injection. They were not told details about the procedure, nor did not give their consent.
Denmark says more than 4,000 women and girls — reportedly half the fertile women in Greenland at the time — received IUDs between the 1960s and mid-1970s.
The alleged purpose was to limit population growth in Greenland by preventing pregnancies. The population on the Arctic island was rapidly increasing at the time due to better living conditions and better healthcare.
The cases occurred between the 1960s and early 1990s. Greenland took over its own healthcare programs on Jan. 1, 1992.
The Danish government on Thursday approved payouts of about $46,500 to each victim. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen officially apologized last year.
Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said a reconciliation commission would be set up, a move that Frederiksen endorsed in a statement Friday.
Authors split findings into two reports
On Friday, the Greenlandic government only accepted the findings of one of the reports, saying an expert found that the second — the one that definitively said a genocide had not taken place — did not meet recognized scientific standards.
“There is no empirical evidence to assume that any Danish or Greenlandic authority, or any individual healthcare professional, at any time had any intention of destroying the Greenlandic population or a significant proportion of it,” the authors of the rejected report wrote. “There was no genocide.”
The accepted report, however, did not conclude whether there was a genocide. The authors wrote that they were not able to determine if any intent to destroy the population existed solely through the forcible contraception cases, and suggested further study that encompassed other Danish practices at the time that affected Greenlandic children and families. The authors did not, unlike the other report, conclusively say a genocide did not occur.
“It is difficult to imagine circumstances in which an attempt to substantially reduce the population of a single ethnic group could not constitute an intent to destroy, in part, that ethnicity,” the report said.
The reports were originally supposed to be a single publication but two of the four members of the group broke away several months ago and wrote their own report. Theirs was the one rejected by the island’s government; one of the authors is a former director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
“The reason given was professional disagreements amongst the members and, to some extent, concerns about the geopolitical situation,” the Greenlandic government said Friday in a news release.
The news release did not elaborate on what the two authors considered to be the geopolitical situation.
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