DENMARK and Greenland apologised today for forcing contraceptives on unwitting indigenous women and girls in the 1960s and 1970s.

Nearly 150 Inuit women sued the Danish state and filed compensation claims against the Health Ministry because they were fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices preventing conception. Many did not consent or were not even aware doctors were fitting the devices.

About 4,500 women and girls — roughly half the entire population of fertile women at the time on the sparsely inhabited Arctic island — received the devices, in a programme supposedly purely aimed at limiting population growth, but which bears some similarity to the forced sterilisation of Native American women in the United States around the same time — something later done on a wide scale in the South American country of Peru.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the government took responsibility and an investigation would report on the issue next month. “I would like to say, on behalf of Denmark: sorry.”