Danish Women find contraceptive coils implanted in their bodies without their consent
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Danish government attempted to curb the burgeoning Inuit population in Greenland by implanting contraceptive devices in thousands of women, some as young as 12.
This so-called "Coil Campaign" has prompted the Danish government to announce an impartial investigation.With requests rising for deeper investigation, the BBC has gathered accounts from women regarding recent involuntary contraception.
At age 21, Bebiane went to get a coil placed, but she was given the startling news that she already had one inside her. She was in tears when she told them she couldn't recall having a call put in her.
Only during Bebiane's abortion when she was 16 in the early 2000s, she thinks, could the coil have been placed without her knowledge. She had terrible abdominal pain that rendered her unable to climb stairs for the next four years.
"I went to the hospital so many times, and they didn't know what was wrong with me…the pain came when I had my period, but it also came when I didn't have my period. After trying for almost a year, she still had not conceived.
After getting the false idea from well-meaning friends that taking a break from trying and getting a coil would increase her fertility, she decided to do just that, and then realized that one was already installed.
Within a few months of having it removed, she became pregnant. Even more recent than what Mira [alias] has gone through, in 2019, during a routine checkup, the doctor discovered the coil.
Mira believes it could only have been placed there covertly during a minor uterine procedure she underwent in 2018. For an entire year following the operation, she endured excruciating pain. She claims her doctor repeatedly disregarded this until a thorough examination uncovered the coil.
Doctors told Mira, now 45, that the coil had punctured her uterus.
Due to exhaustion from medical complications she attributes to the coil, she resorted to surgically removing her uterus. She claims the surgery was unsuccessful, and that she can no longer have sexual relations because doing so causes her to bleed excessively and experience excruciating pain.
Some women in Greenland appear to have received other contraceptive devices besides the coil without their consent.
In 2011, after having an abortion, Annita [alias] awoke with a "limp feeling" in her arm, which she later discovered to be bandaged. When asked, the Danish doctor explained that it was a contraceptive implant—a thin, bendable plastic rod surgically implanted under the skin of the upper arm to prevent pregnancy.
The doctor, according to Annita, now 31 years old, stated that the implant had been implanted because this was her fourth abortion.
"It was so horrible…he really crossed the line," she said. "I felt violated."
She insisted that he take it off, but he allegedly hesitated at her request. The doctor finally decided to take out the implant when she started ripping at the bandage and vowed to do it herself.
Saara, whose real name has also been changed by BBC, is 28 years old and claims that she, too, woke to the discovery after an operation.
In 2014, after being put under general anesthesia for treatment following a miscarriage, she woke up to find a Danish nurse injecting her with the contraceptive Depo Provera.
She told BBC, "I didn't know what it was and she didn't ask me if I wanted it, just that I should come back to the hospital to get it every three months."
She claims the nurse did not even provide information about the medication's name. And once she did, she had to go online to find out more information.
Saara continued using the drug for a while, but she says she was unable to conceive for a while after she stopped using it so she and her husband could start a family.
Her periods stopped occurring for up to a year following her last Depo Provera injection, which she claims she was not warned about.
Danish and Greenlandic officials settled on a two-year probe in September. As such, it seeks to establish the background leading up to 1991, when Greenland finally wrested sovereignty of its healthcare system from Denmark.
Mimi Karlsen, Greenland's minister of health, told the BBC she had not heard of any recent situations in which women were provided contraception without their agreement.
"If there has been a practice by individuals… which contravenes the law and general ethics and care, it is of course something that we must react to."
She stated that she would be forwarding the BBC's findings to the national health board and the chief medical officer so that they could conduct a thorough evaluation of the cases and determine whether or not this is a widespread issue and whether or not it is related to previous policies.
In 1975, Naja Lybeth was one of the women who participated in the Danish Coil Campaign and was coerced into having a coil inserted.
"I was about 13 years old. It felt like I was stabbed with knives."
The campaign promoted the use of an early form of the IUD known as the Lippes Loop. It was intended for use by women who had already given birth, but it was implanted into girls as young as 12.
Severe bleeding, infection, persistent discomfort, and infertility were only some of the issues that developed when the Lippes Loop was implanted in young women and girls.
In the middle of the 1990s, Dr. Siegstad still often discovered IUDs in patients who were being evaluated for infertility.
She claims that the people in question simply "didn't know they had it. They'd tried to become pregnant for like 10 to 15 years without knowing what the problem was."
Naja, a trauma therapist, explains that many women like herself had blocked out the experience of having the coil inserted because it was so traumatic for them and because they were not given basic information about it beforehand.
"I am part of a traumatised generation of women. The aftermath was too difficult to deal with. It's like we collectively forgot about it."
Naja, who is featured on the BBC's list of 100 outstanding and influential women from around the world this year, says that she herself finally confronted the memories when she began working through personal traumas as part of her training.
She started asking around on Facebook to see if any other women had had a similar experience. Around the subsequent few years, close to two hundred people from all over Greenland responded to her article to confirm that they had. She is now advocating on behalf of all women who have been harmed by the incident.
In fact, the full scope of the campaign wasn't made public until this year, when a Danish podcast covering the incident was released. Because of this, there was a major uproar in the country.
Spiralkampagnen (or "The Coil Campaign" in English) is a podcast that uncovered evidence that 4,500 Greenlandic women and girls had the Lippes Loop implanted in them between 1966 and 1970. Half of the country's 9,000 women of childbearing age at the time were represented there.
Greenland's population has exploded during the 1950s, thanks in large part to urbanization and improved medical care, therefore the campaign's goal was to rein it in. This expansion, coupled with the rising incidence of underage pregnancies, has caused concern among Danish officials.
The substantial decline in fertility rates by 1970 allowed campaign backers to declare victory; the trend lasted for some time afterward. Fertility rates in Greenland dropped from seven children per woman to 2.5 in the eight years between 1966, when the campaign began, and 1974, when they stabilized.
According to Denmark's interim health minister Magnus Heunicke, there are no records of when the campaign ended; therefore, the current investigation is tasked with determining when it did.
Naja had her coil removed at the ripe old age of 17 after suffering through years of discomfort. After several unsuccessful years of attempting to conceive, she was able to have her first kid when she was 35.
Her friend Holga, meanwhile, went to the doctor multiple times to get pain medication and eventually for help getting pregnant. She claims she was assured there was nothing wrong with her, but never examined.
She has no recollection of exactly when the coil was discovered and removed, but it prevented her from having children. A plethora of Lippes Loop-related complications led to Holga's hysterectomy in 2018.