Greenland launches commission into Danish forced sterilisation

The matter is this: from the 1960s to 1990, Danish authorities fitted intrauterine devices into Indigenous women and girls in Greenland, often without their knowledge or consent, and Greenland’s government has now resolved to open a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine it. The question is whether any of the reasons that were given at the time - reasons of public health, of population management, of what was called modernization - would survive a conversation with one of the women it was done to, if she were sitting across the table from the minister who signed the policy.

I do not think they would. Let us apply the test plainly. A policy is not justified because it was administered by a government, stamped with the authority of a ministry, filed under public health. That is a description of who did it, not an argument for why it was right. Denmark in the 1960s was, by its own account, a liberal and enlightened state - and it is precisely this fact that should trouble us, because it means the atrocity was not an aberration of some backward regime but the considered policy of a modern one, carried out by doctors, recorded in ledgers, defended at the time as progress. The corset-maker’s son in me has no patience for the idea that progress and virtue are the same thing. A policy can be efficient, well-organized, and thoroughly modern, and still be an outrage against the person on whom it is practiced.

Here is the hereditary check. Was this consented to by the women and girls it was inflicted upon, or was it inherited - imposed by an authority located in Copenhagen and administered upon bodies in Nuuk and the settlements beyond it, without the say of the people who bore the consequence? The geography answers the question before the politics does. A decision made in one capital about the wombs of women in another territory is not policy, it is dominion. And dominion dressed in the language of contraception and family planning is dominion still - the mechanism only made it quieter than a soldier’s, more difficult to name, and so it went unnamed for thirty years and more.

Now to the contested point, which is whether this constituted genocide. I will not flinch from it. The word is heavy, and heavy words are precisely the ones that governments prefer to leave undefined, because an undefined word cannot indict anyone. But strip the word to its plain meaning: a policy, sustained over decades, aimed at reducing the births of a specific people, administered by the government of another people who held power over them. Whatever a tribunal eventually rules, the ordinary reader does not need a tribunal to see what is described. A woman who went in for a checkup and came out fitted with a device she never asked for and could not have refused, because she did not know it was there - that is not a footnote to history. That is a fact that ought to unsettle every person who reads it, and if it does not unsettle you, ask yourself what threshold of injury you have set for outrage, and why it is set so high.

The Commission Greenland’s government is now establishing will be attacked, I expect, on the grounds that it reopens old wounds, that Denmark has already apologized, that reconciliation should look forward rather than back. I say the wound was never closed; it was left untreated under a bandage of silence for two generations, and a wound left untreated does not heal, it festers and shapes the body around it. Truth commissions are not exercises in nostalgia. They are the only mechanism by which a government that harmed people without their consent can be made to answer to the people it harmed, in public, on the record, where habit and bureaucratic silence can no longer serve as a substitute for an answer.

I will leave you with the plain translation. What is being investigated is not a medical program that went wrong. It is a claim by one government upon the future of a people who did not ask to be planned for - and the thousands of women still living who carry that claim in their bodies are owed more than an inquiry. They are owed the truth, spoken plainly, by name.