The Danish Parliament has approved legislation granting compensation to Greenlandic women who were given contraceptive devices or treatments without their informed consent while Denmark controlled Greenland’s healthcare system.
The decision, adopted by a large parliamentary majority on 27 August 2026, transforms a compensation agreement announced in December 2025 into law and represents one of Denmark’s most consequential attempts to confront the colonial injustices inflicted upon Greenland’s Inuit population.
Compensation of DKK 300,000 for each eligible woman
Under the legislation approved at Christiansborg in Copenhagen, each eligible woman will receive DKK 300,000, equivalent to approximately €40,000. The scheme applies principally to Greenlandic women who were given contraception without valid consent between 1960 and 1991, the period during which the Danish state remained responsible for Greenland’s healthcare system. The measures covered by the law are not limited to intrauterine devices, commonly known as coils or IUDs. Women subjected without proper consent to contraceptive implants or injections, including the hormonal contraceptive Depo-Provera, may also qualify. Certain women who were living in Denmark may be included if they are descended from someone who lived in Greenland, retain strong connections with the country and are considered by the Danish Patient Compensation Association to have experienced comparable circumstances. The government previously estimated that as many as 4,500 women could be eligible. Applications opened on 1 July 2026, while the parliamentary process was completed later because the original timetable had been interrupted by Denmark’s general election and the formation of a new government.
The “coil campaign” and the control of Greenlandic births
The scandal is generally known in Denmark and Greenland as the spiralsagen, or “coil case”. From the 1960s onwards, thousands of Greenlandic Inuit women and girls were fitted with IUDs as Danish authorities pursued an extensive programme intended to reduce Greenland’s rapidly growing birth rate. Many of the patients were adolescents. Some were only 12 or 13 years old, and numerous women have said that neither they nor their parents were properly informed or asked for consent. The scale of the programme was extraordinary. Approximately 4,500 IUDs were inserted between 1966 and 1970 alone, at a time when Greenland had only around 9,000 women of childbearing age. Some girls were summoned following medical examinations at school and sent to hospital without being told adequately what would happen to them. Others discovered only many years later that they were carrying an IUD. Several of the devices used were designed for adult women who had already given birth and were physically unsuitable for young girls. Survivors have described severe pain, bleeding, infections and damage to their reproductive health. Some experienced miscarriages, infertility or the eventual removal of their uterus, while the psychological consequences continued long after the procedures themselves.
An independent investigation confirmed systemic failures
Public scrutiny intensified in 2022 after the Danish broadcaster DR released the investigative podcast Spiralkampagnen, based partly on documents from Denmark’s national archives. The revelations led the Danish and Greenlandic governments to commission an independent historical investigation covering contraceptive practices between 1960 and 1991. Its findings, published in September 2025, documented the experiences of more than 350 women and girls and concluded that Greenlandic patients had been subjected to serious and repeated failures involving information, consent and medical treatment. The evidence showed that the abuses were not a handful of isolated mistakes by individual doctors. They formed part of a much wider system in which decisions about the bodies and fertility of Inuit women were made within an unequal relationship between Denmark and Greenland. That imbalance affected the way healthcare policies were designed, administered and justified. The investigation also found examples of involuntary contraception continuing after Greenland assumed control of its healthcare system in 1992. Those later cases are the responsibility of Greenland’s authorities and have been addressed through a separate Greenlandic compensation scheme.
The women who forced the case into public view
The new legislation would probably not exist without the persistence of Greenlandic women who spoke publicly about profoundly personal experiences that had long been overlooked. Psychologist Naja Lyberth became one of the most prominent campaigners after describing how she was fitted with an IUD as a young teenager without meaningful consent. In 2023, Lyberth and 66 other women demanded compensation from the Danish state rather than waiting indefinitely for the official inquiry. The group later grew to 143 claimants and brought legal proceedings against Denmark, each seeking DKK 300,000 for violations of their human rights. Their action transformed the case from a historical investigation into an immediate political and legal question. The women repeatedly emphasised that time mattered: many of those subjected to the earliest procedures were already elderly, and official recognition delayed for several more years might arrive too late.
Denmark’s apology and the limits of financial redress
In August 2025, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen formally apologised on behalf of Denmark to the affected Greenlandic women. Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen apologised separately for cases that occurred after Greenland took responsibility for healthcare. A public ceremony was subsequently held at the Katuaq cultural centre in Nuuk. The compensation law gives material effect to the Danish apology, but money cannot reverse infertility, restore lost pregnancies or erase decades of physical and psychological suffering. Its importance lies instead in the state’s acknowledgement that the women were wronged and that their treatment cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate product of another era. The legislation passed with support extending well beyond the governing coalition. Parties from across the Danish political spectrum voted in favour, as did representatives from Greenland and the Faroe Islands. During the parliamentary debate, Greenlandic MP Qarsoq Høegh-Dam described compensation as the least Denmark could do, while warning that the coil case represented only the “tip of the iceberg”.
A broader history of Danish colonial policy
Greenland formally ceased to be a Danish colony in 1953, but its incorporation into the Kingdom of Denmark did not immediately produce an equal relationship. Danish authorities continued to exercise extensive control over healthcare, education and social policy, often treating Greenlandic language and culture as obstacles to modernisation. The contraception scandal therefore belongs to a broader history that includes the removal of Greenlandic children from their families, pressure to adopt the Danish language and discriminatory assessments that separated Greenlandic parents from their children. In another notorious episode, 22 Greenlandic children were taken to Denmark in 1951 as part of an experiment intended to create a Danish-speaking Greenlandic elite. Only six eventually returned to their families. Frederiksen apologised for that experiment in 2020, and the surviving participants later received compensation. Both cases demonstrate how policies presented as healthcare, education or modernisation could become instruments of colonial power when those affected were denied meaningful participation in the decisions governing their lives.
Reconciliation, independence and Greenland’s future
The compensation law arrives while relations between Denmark and Greenland are being reconsidered more widely. Greenland has enjoyed self-government since 2009 and possesses a recognised right to pursue independence, but Copenhagen still controls areas including foreign policy, defence and monetary affairs. Denmark also provides a substantial annual block grant supporting Greenland’s public finances. The coil case has become part of Greenland’s debate about whether genuine equality is possible within the Danish kingdom. Some Greenlandic political figures have characterised the campaign as an attempt to reduce the Inuit population and have called for an examination of whether it could constitute genocide under international law. An investigation commissioned by Greenland’s government is considering both the legal responsibility of the Danish state and the effects of the trauma upon later generations. Compensation does not settle those questions, nor does it resolve the wider debate over independence. It does, however, establish an important principle: policies imposed upon Indigenous people cannot be judged solely by the administrative intentions claimed by the authorities that created them. They must also be assessed through the experiences, rights and consent of the people upon whom those policies were enforced.
Recognition after decades of silence
The passage of the law is a victory for the women who refused to allow their experiences to disappear from the historical record. Their testimony exposed a system in which reproductive decisions were taken away from Greenlandic women and placed in the hands of institutions operating within a profoundly unequal colonial relationship. DKK 300,000 cannot measure the value of a lost opportunity to have children, decades of pain or the knowledge that one’s body was used to pursue a demographic policy. Yet the compensation scheme gives survivors a formal route to recognition without requiring every woman to conduct an individual court battle against the Danish state. Denmark has now moved from investigation to apology and from apology to legislation. The more difficult stage will be ensuring that the process is accessible to women throughout Greenland, that claims are treated with dignity and that the history revealed by the coil case changes the way both countries understand their shared past.
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