What Europe’s Rage at the United States Over Greenland Leaves Out
Solidarity Without Self-Reckoning
Outrage, Then and Now
In mid-January 2026, protests swept across Greenland and Denmark in response to escalating U.S. pressure over the island’s future. Nuuk, a city of about 20,000 people, saw some of the largest demonstrations in its history. Across Europe, political leaders and publics spoke with moral certainty: Indigenous rights, sovereignty, self-determination. This, we were told, must never be violated again.
Missing from the current discussion is the history of coercive reproductive policies imposed on Inuit women in Greenland.
What Was Done in Greenland
From the 1960s through the 1970s, Danish authorities oversaw a widespread campaign of coercive birth control in Greenland, most notably the forced or non-consensual insertion of IUDs in Inuit girls and women. These interventions were carried out through official medical systems and justified in the language of modernization, public health, and welfare economics. The aim was explicit population control. This was not the work of rogue doctors. It was state policy.
Denmark has since acknowledged this history, issuing a formal apology in 2025 and launching compensation and investigative processes. This is not ancient history: many of the women affected are still alive, the institutions involved still operate, and the apology itself is barely a year old.
Why did this reckoning not provoke a comparable public response in Europe when it occurred?
Why Population Reduction Was Seen as Necessary to Denmark
The campaign unfolded primarily in the late 1960s, during Denmark’s rapid postwar effort to modernize Greenland. This was not driven by concerns about overpopulation in any absolute sense. Greenland was—and remains—sparsely populated. The concern was administrative and economic.
Danish officials viewed high birth rates among Inuit women as incompatible with the welfare-state model they were imposing: urban housing, wage labor, compulsory schooling, and centralized healthcare. A rapidly growing population was seen as likely to outpace housing supply, strain social services, and increase long-term welfare costs. Fertility, in this framework, became a variable to be managed rather than a private decision to be respected.
Official investigations indicate that during the late 1960s the program affected a significant share of women of childbearing age in Greenland, likely on the order of a third. This was not a marginal or incidental intervention, but a population-level policy justified as rational governance.
While the details may not have been widely known to the European public at the time, it strains credulity to suggest that other European governments were unaware of policies being implemented in a territory administered by Denmark.
The Nordic Factor
Sweden, Finland, and Norway have been among the most visible voices expressing solidarity with Greenlandic Inuit. Each has its own distinct and documented history of coercive assimilation and state control affecting Indigenous communities. Without detouring this piece, it is at least notable that their representation in the current European military mission to Greenland is conspicuous when compared with other European states of similar size.
Solidarity Without Self-Reckoning
Europe is offering solidarity now—statements, protests, moral language.
“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.”
— John 8:7