The women who have finally been paid are in their sixties, seventies and eighties now. Some of them have spent most of their adult lives not knowing why they could not have children, or why something inside their bodies hurt, or why a doctor at some point looked at a scan and asked them a question they had no answer to. The payments landed in their accounts recently, about 300,000 Danish kroner each, roughly $47,000. It is the first money any of them have received for something that was done to them as schoolgirls, in some cases sixty years ago.
The Danish state has a formal name for what happened, and the Danish and Greenlandic press have a short one. In Danish it is the coil case, or the spiral case, after the contraceptive device at the centre of it. Between the early 1960s and the start of the 1990s, thousands of Greenlandic girls and women were fitted with intrauterine devices by a health service run from Copenhagen, and a great many of them were not told what was being done, were not asked, and did not agree to it.
An official investigation ordered by Denmark and Greenland and published last year found that by the end of 1970 alone, around 4,070 Greenlandic women and girls had been fitted with coils. To understand what that number means you have to put it next to the size of the population it came from. Greenland at the time had somewhere in the region of nine thousand women of childbearing age. The investigators put it plainly: this amounted to something like every second Greenlandic-born woman.
The investigation examined the accounts of 354 women. Among those cases, it could find documentation that the woman had actually given informed consent in 47 of them.
Some of the girls were twelve years old.
The reason any of this became known is that a woman named Naja Lyberth decided, years ago, to say out loud what had happened to her. She is a psychologist, and she lives in Nuuk now. She was thirteen, living in Maniitsoq on Greenland’s west coast, when she was sent to the hospital for a procedure she had not asked for and did not understand. She has described what it did to her, physically and otherwise, in her own words and on her own terms, over and over, in interviews and in writing, for the better part of a decade. She has said she believes it affected her ability to have children. She has been blunt about what a girl that age loses when an adult in a white coat does something like that to her and calls it healthcare.
What she did next mattered more than any single account. She started a group online where other Greenlandic women could find each other, and they did, in numbers. Women who had thought they were alone with a private medical mystery discovered that their friends, their cousins, their classmates, women from the same small towns and the same school years, had the same story. Some of them had gone through miscarriages and complications and years of pain. Some had only learned what was inside them decades later, by accident, during an unrelated examination. Several have said the worst part was not the discovery but the arithmetic that followed it, working backwards through their own lives and realising what had been decided for them before they were old enough to have an opinion.
Lyberth has been named internationally for this work, including on the BBC’s list of a hundred women a few years back, and a photographer’s documentary series about the survivors won a major international award. None of that was the point. The point was that once dozens of women were telling the same story, it stopped being anecdote and became a matter that a government had to answer.
What turned a group of women talking among themselves into a national reckoning was a piece of journalism. Danish public radio built a documentary series around the case a few years ago, and its reporters went into the archives and came back with the campaign’s own paperwork, the records of a programme that had been documented at the time and then simply left to sit. Within weeks Greenland’s parliament had voted to demand an investigation, and the Danish and Greenlandic governments agreed to run one together.
That sequence says something about how this stayed hidden for so long. It was not lost. The files existed. What was missing was anyone with the standing to insist that somebody read them, and for decades the women who could have insisted had been raised not to.
Lyberth has made that point herself, and it is one of the more devastating things she has said. She has described how everything about the way she was brought up made it close to impossible to argue with a doctor or to walk out of the room. A thirteen year old in a small town, sent by adults to an adult, in a system run in a language and a manner imported from somewhere else, does not refuse. The campaign relied on that, whether or not anyone designing it ever wrote the reliance down.
The women who have spoken publicly have described decades of pain, of complications, of surgeries, and of a shame they had no reason to carry and carried anyway. Several have described the years afterwards as time spent frozen inside their own bodies. They have been careful, in nearly every public account, to put the emphasis on the same place: that the ability to decide whether to have children is not a medical preference but something that belonged to them and was taken. In 2023 the campaigners were given Denmark’s own human rights award, which a number of them noted was a strange and welcome thing to receive from the country they were suing.
The history underneath it is the awkward part, and it is not ancient. Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953 and then a Danish county, and Denmark ran its health service until 1992. In the post-war decades there was open official concern in Copenhagen about Greenland’s birth rate and about the cost of the population growing faster than the housing and the schools could absorb. The coil campaign was run against that background. Whether it is best described as a deliberate policy of population control or as a public health programme that trampled consent is the exact question that Danish and international experts have not fully agreed on, and the disagreement is not cosmetic. The independent investigation’s Danish framing leaned towards treating the failures as serious but not systematically directed, while human rights scholars looking at the same record have argued the pattern is too consistent and too one-sided to read as a series of individual lapses. Greenlandic women who lived it have largely made clear which reading they recognise.
What is not in dispute is that it continued. The commonly used window for the case runs from 1960 or 1965 to 1991, and the practice did not stop neatly at the moment Greenland took over its own health system. That is why there are now two compensation tracks rather than one. Denmark is paying for what happened while it ran the service. Greenland’s own authorities have set up a separate scheme for cases after the handover, which is an uncomfortable inheritance for a government that had no part in designing the original campaign.
The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, apologised last year, alongside Greenland’s leader Jens-Frederik Nielsen. She said the women had been wronged, and specifically pushed back on the idea that you can excuse what happened by saying it was simply how things were done at the time. That framing matters, because the most common defence of historical state conduct is exactly that one, and it was rejected by the person holding the office that would have benefited from it.
An apology is not money, and the women had been asking for money for years before this. In 2023 Lyberth and dozens of others filed claims. By early 2024, 143 Greenlandic women were pursuing Denmark for compensation of 300,000 kroner each, and the state’s initial legal posture involved the ordinary machinery of limitation periods, which is to say the argument that too much time had passed. That argument was legally available and morally impossible, given that the whole reason time had passed was that the women were never told what had been done to them. Any clock that starts when the wrong occurs is useless when the wrong was concealed from the person it happened to.
Eventually the political answer arrived. A compensation law was passed with support across the Danish parliament, having been delayed by a general election and the business of forming a government. Applications opened in the middle of this year, the legislation took effect at the start of September, and the first approvals followed almost immediately. The scheme sets a flat figure of 300,000 kroner per woman, about $47,000. The government has estimated that as many as 4,500 women could be eligible, although the true number is genuinely unknown and sources differ, which is why nobody involved is quoting it with confidence.
The scheme covers more than coils. It extends to women given contraceptive implants or injections without informed consent in the same period, which widens it beyond the device the case is named after. It also, in certain circumstances, covers women of Greenlandic background living in Denmark who went through comparable treatment and retain a strong connection to Greenland.
The claims are handled by Patienterstatningen, the Danish patient compensation body, which is the same organisation that processes ordinary medical injury claims. That is an efficient choice and a strange one. It means that women in their seventies and eighties are now completing claim forms about hospital appointments from their childhood, appointments whose purpose was deliberately not explained to them, and being asked to describe on paper what happened in a room they were taken to before they were old enough to refuse.
In the first month the scheme was open, 171 women filed. The head of the compensation body’s secretariat has said he expects many more before the deadline, and has been frank about the reason for the slow start, which is that writing it down means living through it again. Women who have spent fifty years not talking about something do not fill in a form about it in the first week.
The deadline itself is the sharpest of the outstanding criticisms. Claims must be in by 2028, and Greenland’s human rights council has objected on a simple, factual ground: doctors are still finding coils in women who did not know they were there. If a woman has not yet discovered what was done to her, a cut-off date is not a neutral administrative detail. It is a way of closing the file before everyone it concerns has found out they are in it.
There are other limits that the women’s advocates have raised and that are not fully resolved. The scheme is a state payment scheme, not a court judgment, and it does not produce the findings of fact that a trial would. A flat sum treats very different lives identically, which is either fair or crude depending on where you are standing. Greenlandic critics have also argued that the investigation into what happened was conducted largely on Danish terms, without enough Greenlandic authorship over how the history gets written, and several have called for a truth commission rather than a report and a payout. That argument is about something a bank transfer cannot address, which is who gets to say what this was.
And there is the plain fact that many of the women this was done to are already dead. They spent entire lives not knowing, or knowing and never being believed, and no scheme opening in 2026 reaches them.
What is left is the thing the women themselves have generally named as the point, which is not the size of the payment. Almost all of them have said some version of the same thing over the years: they wanted it acknowledged, in writing, by the state, that it happened and that it was wrong. For decades the answer they got was silence, or the suggestion that they were misremembering, or the observation that medical practice was different back then. The money is worth roughly $47,000 and functions mainly as proof. It is a document you can hold that says the state agrees with your account of your own life.
Lyberth has said that what she has always wanted is for the women to be believed while they are still here to be believed. That is now partly done. The first of them have been paid. The rest are working through the forms, slowly, at whatever speed a person can manage when the paperwork is about the worst thing that ever happened to them.
It took sixty years, an apology, a change in the law and a woman who refused to keep it to herself. The envelopes are late beyond any possible defence. They did arrive.