In 2022, Denmark and Greenland have formally agreed to launch a two-year investigation into historic birth control practices carried out for many years on Inuit Greenlanders by Danish doctors. Thousands of Inuit women and girls were fitted with an intrauterine device (IUD), commonly known as a coil, without consent or understanding what the procedure was for. Records indicate that up to 4,500 women and girls - roughly half of all fertile females - had an IUD implanted in Greenland between 1966 and 1970. Many were too young to understand what was happening to them, often without parental consent.
Greenland transitioned from a colony to a county of Denmark in 1953; its population almost doubled by 1970. A commentator drew attention to the high proportion of young single mothers and the challenges of providing housing and welfare services: "the rationale for introducing the coil was partly financial, but also the result of colonial attitudes".