Patient Compensation to seek Greenland women affected by non-consensual IUDs

Denmark’s Patient Compensation authority will travel across Greenland to inform women who had intrauterine devices inserted by Danish doctors without their consent about their right to compensation, DR reports.

The authority’s first stop is a clergy convention in Sisimiut, where Trine Berner Madsen, who leads the effort, will speak to priests from across Greenland. She will ask them to inform their congregations that Denmark is prepared to pay compensation to affected women.

The compensation law, which provides 300,000 kroner to each woman covered by the scheme, was finally adopted by the Danish parliament at the end of August and came into force on Monday.

Patient Compensation has been given responsibility both for administering the scheme and for providing outreach and guidance to affected Greenlandic women in Greenland and Denmark.

A travelling team will begin visiting Greenland in October. It will meet women locally, explain the scheme and offer help with applications. The goal is to ensure that all Greenlandic women know what the law covers and how to apply.

The campaign presents logistical challenges because of Greenland’s size and the potentially severe weather as the year draws to a close. The team will not initially travel to eastern Greenland, where cases of women receiving IUDs without consent have already been identified. That part of the campaign will wait until spring.

The first of three planned tours has been organised according to what is logistically possible and where there are many women in the age group that may have been affected, Madsen said.

Patient Compensation has so far received 342 applications from Greenlandic women who say Danish doctors gave them contraception they had not requested. The authority expects the number of affected women to be considerably higher.

For many women, the experience was traumatic. Some suffered such serious damage to their reproductive organs that they were unable to have children.

Madsen said the subject was difficult and sensitive, requiring the authority to find new ways to reach the women. Priests were chosen as an initial point of contact because they play an important role in Greenlandic society and can help raise awareness of the scheme while offering support, including pastoral care.