They seek a very slim compensation for what they were subjected to. I hope the Danish government just agrees, fighting it would basically mean that they stand by the actions.
$38k?! I’d want at least 20 times that
It’s a very small price to pay for eugenics. I agree that they deserve much more, but my point was rather that the government absolutely shouldn’t fight it.
I’m not sure Sweden ever offered any sort of damages to the trans people that were forced to sterilise. We abolished that law in 2013 I believe.
We nordics like to pretend that we’re progressive, and in some cases we are, but we can be damned evil too. Stop and frisk was a big talking point during the last election here in Sweden.
The relation with Greenland is a really dark spot in Denmarks history and it´s still not been dealt with sufficiently, as cases like this make very clear.
Forgive my ignorance as I don’t know very much about the relation between Denmark and Greenland, but why did Denmark do this to these women? The article mentions decreasing births in the arctic areas, but why? And why did they choose such a grim way of doing so?
They were afraid an increasing greenlandic population would be too expensive.
I am not sure about the specifics and officially not even the Danish government is:
On 30 September 2022, the Danish Health Minister, Magnus Heunicke, confirmed that a two-year investigation would try to find out what decisions led to the practice and how it was carried out source
On the other hand the typical reason for eugenics is to control the size of a group or a population, so it seems pretty obvious that the people responsible did it to reduce the Inuit population by genocide:
Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam, a Siumut member of the Folketing (Danish parliament) called the campaign genocide. She stated that in the Danish desire to modernize Greenland, elevating the material conditions of its residents was too expensive, so the government instituted a program to commit genocide on the population. source
This all sounds very fu - I know - but we have to consider that Greenland used to be a colony of Denmark and is still not free but what I would call a semi- or post-colony of Denmark. My best guess is that racist eugenics (as in systematically reducing the indigenous population) was the real reason, while the official reason given was probably to reduce “social problems” like teenage pregnancy rates. As a colonized people the indigenous Inuit of Greenland have the typical problems many cultures develop when being colonized and having their culture partially or totally destroyed. This means severe psycho-social conflicts for the whole population, resulting in catastrophically raised alcoholism, depression and suicide rates. For a long time the danish government has used these problems as an excuse for their racism and to take an extremely paternalistic stance towards the Inuit of Greenland. This is cynical af, because the social problems on Greenland are in the first place results of being colonized by Denmark. So that whole argument is obviously some apologetic nonsense in the tradition of “The White Man´s Burden”.
I am not sure what you mean by “grim” though. If you look into the gruesome history of colonialism you will find that putting IUDs in women without their consent seems pretty tame in comparison to … most other common kinds of genocide.
