Coil scandal The women who were forcibly fitted with IUDs

Victims left traumatised and infertile after birth control devices were inserted without consent by Danish doctors

- Miranda Bryant

Hedvig Frederiksen had been at her new school in Paamiut, Greenland, for only a couple of days when she was summoned from her dorm to hospital by a Danish caretaker.

She was 14 and had no idea what was going on. "But back then [1974], when a Danish person said something, their word was law, you had to listen to them," said Frederiksen, at her home in Nuuk, Greenland's capital.

About a dozen girls went to the hospital. One by one they went into the doctor's room and one by one they came out crying.

Frederiksen's daughter Aviaja Fontain told the story as her mother quietly wept. "When she came in [to the doctor's room], her memory just disappears and she thinks it's because of the trauma... Her friend from the same dorm said the doctor didn't have a helper; he was alone putting spirals [contraceptive coils] inside girls." Frederiksen, now 63, is one of 143 Greenlandic women who last month announced they were suing the Danish state, demanding a collective payment of close to 43m Danish kroner ($6.2m) for what they describe as a violation of their human rights.

They accuse Danish doctors of fitting girls as young as 12 with intrauterine devices (IUDS) in an attempt to reduce the population of the former colony, now an autonomous Danish territory. It is believed that 4,500 women and girls were affected between 1966 and 1970, with many more procedures carried out without consent in subsequent decades, but it has taken a long time for the reports to surface and to be taken seriously.