Something extraordinary happened in Greenland last month, and much of the world barely noticed.

An independent investigation into Denmark’s decades-long “Spiral Case”—the forced or non-consensual insertion of intrauterine devices into thousands of Kalaallit Inuit women and girls—produced not one conclusion, but two. The four-investigator team split over one of the most consequential questions imaginable: whether these practices should be understood strictly as reproductive rights violations, or whether they form part of a wider, more menacing pattern of cultural genocide.

The international press largely treated this as a technical disagreement. Reuters reported that forced birth control violated women’s rights but “didn’t constitute genocide.” AP’s headline read: “Reports split over whether forced contraception of Greenlandic women and girls constituted genocide.” BBC emphasized that Greenland’s findings were not final, a view eloquently articulated by Greenland’s Minister of Justice, and by the Prime Minister of Greenland when calling for a reconciliation commission to further probe the unsettled nature of this most unsettling issue.

The question is not simply whether a particular medical procedure met the legal definition of genocide. The question is whether such unethical reproductive control, when viewed alongside decades of policies that separated Inuit children from their parents, suppressed their language, disrupted their cultural identity, displaced communities from the land, and weakened the demographic and economic foundations of Greenlandic society, reveals a more obvious pattern of cultural genocide, as one report suggests is likely.

The four investigators tasked with this momentous inquiry split into two contending teams, almost as if one represented Greenland’s distinctive “transnational/Indigenous” perspective (Inupiat human rights lawyer and former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council Dalee Sambo Dorough, and New Zealand international human rights legal scholar Miriam Cullen), and the other represented Denmark’s “Westphalian” perspective (Danish human rights lawyer Jonas Christoffersen, and Danish psychologist Jensine Nedergaard).

Drs. Dorough and Cullen concluded there was “reasonable basis to believe that the state failed to meet its binding treaty obligations … to prevent the physical acts underlying the international crime of genocide.” While they did not say the contraception evidence by itself definitively established genocidal intent, they instead argued that the question of intent cannot responsibly be settled without examining the broader history of Danish policy toward Greenlandic Inuit, a history they found troubling and which they felt compelled to examine.

In contrast, Drs. Christoffersen and Nedergaard reached a very different conclusion, finding no empirical evidence that Danish or Greenlandic authorities or health professionals intended to commit genocide and limiting their breakaway investigation to this narrower line of inquiry. While such a view may align with the narrow self-interest of the Danish state to escape culpability, it did not sit well with Greenland’s government, which felt these two Danish experts had failed to fully address the entirety of issues for which they were tasked as investigators.

Spiral Case Did Not Happen in Isolation

Between 1960 and 1991, Danish medical authorities placed IUDs in more than 4,000 Greenlandic women and girls—roughly half of the fertile female population. Some were as young as 12. Many say they were not properly informed or did not consent. The scale alone is staggering. But scale alone does not equate to genocide. International law requires something more: an intention to destroy a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in substantial part. Article II(d) of the 1948 Genocide Convention specifically includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” This distinction explains the split in the 2026 reports.

Importantly, the forced contraception campaign was accompanied by other policies that profoundly disrupted Greenlandic society. In 1951, 22 Inuit children were taken from Greenland to Denmark in what became known as the “Little Danes” experiment. They were supposed to become a Danish-speaking elite who would help modernize Greenland. Instead, many were separated from their families, language and culture. Later, hundreds of Greenlandic children were placed in Danish foster homes.

Danish became the dominant language in education and administration, while Kalaallisut—the Greenlandic language—was marginalized. During the same broad period, the G60 modernization program closed small settlements and moved Inuit families into larger urban centers, severing many people from traditional hunting and fishing economies and from the land itself. These policies do not automatically converge into a genocide finding. They had different purposes, occurred at different times, and will require further evidence connecting them to the specific intent demanded by international law.

But neither should they be studied in isolation. When reproductive suppression, child separation, linguistic assimilation, economic disruption and displacement are placed side-by-side, they reveal something much larger than a medical scandal: they reveal the extraordinary extent to which colonial authorities once believed they had the right to reshape an entire Indigenous society. While these broader and most troubling issues were left unaddressed by the two Danish experts who brought their narrowed perspective to their task, Drs. Dorough and Cullen felt they provide important context for addressing the question of genocide.

Through the Lens of Holocaust

My own reaction is deeply personal. As a Jew, I am particularly sensitive to the ways bureaucratic language can sanitize historical atrocities. From an early age, we are taught to remember. We are taught to recognize how ordinary administrative decisions can accumulate into something catastrophic. We are taught to be suspicious when institutions reduce human suffering to technical categories and legal formulae.

That does not mean every colonial crime is evidence of a new Holocaust. But it does mean that history teaches us to pay particular attention when any government systematically interferes with the ability of a people to reproduce, support its families, maintain its language, and remain connected to its land. It is here that we need not quibble over legal technicalities of intent but can rely instead upon an intuitive gut check: if it looks like genocide, and smells like genocide, there’s a good chance it is genocide.

How can we otherwise understand the cumulative impact of policies that intruded upon Greenlanders’ bodies, separated children from their parents, marginalized their language, disrupted their cultural identity, displaced communities from their traditional economies, and diminished the demographic foundations of their future? While each of these abuses deserves painstaking investigation, when considered together they demand that we confront something far more profound than a collection of isolated wrongs.

Legal caution and/or deflection must not become an excuse for moral blindness. The Spiral Case affected not only the thousands of women who received IUDs. Every birth that was denied affected the next generation and those that followed—children who were never born, family lines that never continued, grandchildren who never arrived to later take care of their elders who now face the end of their lives all alone.

A nation’s future is built one generation at a time. This was a crime against an entire people. That much is obvious. And if that’s not genocide, what is?

A Past That Persists Into the Present

Of note, the morally offensive separation of Greenlandic Inuit children from their mothers is not just a disturbing artifact of history. It has continued, dismayingly, into the present. Consider the case of Keira Alexandra Kronvold. On November 7, 2024, Kronvold gave birth to her daughter, Zammi. Just two hours later, Danish authorities took the newborn from her mother and placed her in foster care.

The decision relied in part on the same culturally inappropriate Parenting Competence Assessment—the FKU—that has been criticized for failing to account adequately for Greenlandic language and culture. In response, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls warned Denmark the removal “may amount to ethnic discrimination.” This past May, Denmark’s Western High Court finally ruled that the removal had been unlawful and found serious problems with the assessment used.

But this was not an isolated case. In August 2025, Greenlandic mother Ivana Nikoline Brønlund gave birth to her daughter, Aviaja-Luuna near Copenhagen where she resides. Only one hour later, Danish authorities removed the newborn. After Greenlandic protest and a growing international outcry, a national appeals board reversed this decision made by local officials that September.

After decades in which Danes controlled Inuit bodies, separated Inuit children from their parents, suppressed their language, disrupted their communities and reshaped their economy to serve colonial interests, the Danish state has forfeited any claim to moral authority over the fundamental question of what is best for Inuit families.

The Genocide Next Door

This affront to human dignity did not happen in a far and distant land. It happened right here, in North America, to an Indigenous people with kinship ties to Alaska’s Inupiat and Canada’s Inuit, and to whom the United States has provided military protection since Denmark fell to the Nazis in World War II.

With the governments of Greenland, Denmark and America now re-aligned on matters of security, as announced in recent days, the time has resumed where America’s moral leadership as a beacon of liberty can reignite and guide us forward, together, as we say no to genocide, and yes to a full accounting of Denmark’s past and present offenses against Greenlanders.

Events associated with the Spiral case and Danish colonial abuses must not be minimized, nor quietly reconciled away. Indeed, this is something that all of us must acknowledge and confront, as neighbors and as allies. And most important of all, this is something we must never forget.

If we are to live up to our responsibility as the protector of Greenland and the defender of its people, we must not close our eyes to the genocide next door any longer.