Greenland, IUDs, and the Quiet Kind of Racism Nobody Wants to Talk About
While the media hyperventilates over Trump saying the U.S. needs Greenland for global security, missile defense, and Arctic stability, maybe we should rewind the tape and talk about what Denmark already did to Greenland.
Spoiler: it involved doctors, not destroyers.
In the 1960s and 70s, Danish authorities quietly fitted thousands of Greenlandic Inuit girls and women with IUDs, often without informed consent, sometimes without parental consent, and in many cases without even telling them what had been done. Some of the girls were barely teenagers. Many only discovered the truth years later, after fertility problems sent them looking for medical answers.
But who exactly are the Inuit people who have lived in Greenland for thousands of years? Not the braid-wearing, blonde, blue-eyed Nordic characters people subconsciously picture when they hear ‘Denmark.’ Inuit are an Indigenous Arctic population, genetically and culturally closer to Native Alaskans and northern Canadian tribes, with dark hair, dark eyes, brown skin, and broader cheekbones with flatter nasal bridges. They were visibly different, politically powerless, and governed by people who did not look like them and did not live like them.
Now back to what happened to these girls and women of Greenland…This was officially called “family planning.”
Which is adorable, if your definition of family planning includes state-directed reproductive suppression of an Indigenous population by a colonial government. Let’s drop the polite vocabulary and say what this actually was:
population management of people who did not have political power over the government, making decisions to force them to be “pro-choice” whether they liked it or not! And no, this was not applied evenly across Danish society. No one was quietly implanting IUD’s into blonde-haired, blue-eyed, middle-class girls in Copenhagen because their birth rates were economically inconvenient. The policy targeted Greenlandic Inuit communities, a visually distinct Indigenous population governed by Denmark, viewed through the familiar colonial lens of social burden, modernization problems, and demographic inconvenience. And yes, it is disgusting. It is the state quietly deciding that a certain group’s future should be smaller, less numerous, easier to administer. That mindset has shown up in different forms all over the world, and it always targets people with the least political protection. It is never aimed at the people writing the policies.
When reproductive control is aimed at one ethnic group governed by another country, and in this case, Denmark, that is not healthcare. That is radicalized, colonial policy wearing a lab coat.
Funny how that works.
Europe loves to lecture the world about bodily autonomy, human rights, and historical injustice. But when it turns out one of its most “progressive” welfare states was medically stopping the reproduction of Indigenous girls, the outrage suddenly gets very quiet, very technical, and very…slow.
There were no international tribunals.
No global sanctions.
No years of nonstop media fury.
Just a podcast decades later, some lawsuits, and eventually a carefully worded apology once the paperwork became impossible to ignore.
Now contrast that with today’s narrative.
Trump says Greenland matters for global security, because it does, and suddenly we are treated to headlines about American imperialism and economic warfare. As if radar stations and shipping lanes are somehow more offensive than a government that once decided which girls should not be allowed to become mothers.
Apparently, strategic defense is colonialism, but demographic engineering is just “regrettable policy from another era.”
Interesting standard.
What makes this even more grotesque is how well it echoes older population-control thinking that showed up in other Western countries, including the U.S., where early birth-control movements openly overlapped with eugenics and targeted poor and minority communities, mostly Black communities, under the banner of social improvement. So yeah, calling the Greenland program of the 60s & 70s, racist is not inflammatory. It is accurate. It was a policy aimed at controlling the reproduction of a specific ethnic group governed by another nation. You do not need hooded robes and burning crosses for racism to exist. Sometimes it wears a lab coat, carries consent forms no one actually signed, and files reports in triplicate. And that, frankly, is the scarier version…
And that is the part nobody wants to say out loud, because it complicates the clean little morality play where America is always the villain, and Europe is always the enlightened do-gooder.
Here is the reality, right in your face:
Denmark exercised colonial authority over Greenland not just politically, but biologically. That happened. It is documented. It affected real little girls and women who are still alive and still dealing with the consequences of children they never got to have and grandchildren they’ll never get to hold. And it should permanently stain any attempt to posture as the moral authority over what happens on that island.
So before anyone starts clutching pearls over U.S. strategic interest in the Arctic, maybe acknowledge that Greenland’s people have already been treated as administrative problems by the very governments now preaching about sovereignty and ethics…the same people they tried to birth-control out of existence.
And if the world is going to start keeping score on who has the moral right to speak about Greenland’s future, maybe we should begin with who already decided Greenland’s girls had too many.
If Americans simply painted this as what it actually was, a government deciding that a group of Indigenous girls should reproduce less for economic convenience, the reaction would be a lot louder and a lot angrier. But instead, it gets treated like a quirky historical footnote from a “nice” country that is supposed to be on the right side of everything.
