A back story. . .

While some laugh at the idea expressed by Pres. Trump of America purchasing Greenland from Denmark, there is a rather sordid back story to the relationship between Denmark and Greenland that is no laughing matter.  In the 1960s and 1970s, Denmark put into place a forced contraception policy aimed to put an end to what the government in Copenhagen viewed as excessive numbers of children born out of wedlock in Greenland.  In addition, they found it prudent to slow overall the birthrates on the island.  Some of this was done by the public health department without the knowledge of the girl's parents.  IUDs were forcibly placed in the girls.  They eventually sued the Danish government last year, demanding compensation and an official apology.   The IUD scandal from decades ago has never been resolved and represents just one tension in an already tense relationship between Greenland and Denmark.  In addition, a second scandal involved the removal of 22 Inuit children from Greenland to make them more overtly Danish and to help the culture of Greenland become more Danish when they returned.  The experiment was a failure and the children were never returned to their parents.  Some ended up in orphanages in Greenland and a few remained in Denmark where they were adopted. Many developed psychological problems and half died in early adulthood.

The sad reality is that the idea of reproductive freedom is solely to prevent reproduction and that birth control and even sterilization have a long and shocking history in the hands of governments who think they know best.  While some might think that people should decide for themselves such things, the decision always seems to involve depriving the child in the womb of the most basic of human rights, the right to life.  As tragic as it has become for whole societies to deem this life unworthy of any real and substantive protections, it is even more scandalous when those societies find it useful or expedient to deprive those considered less than desirable of their right to have a child.  Why is it that nearly everything that has to do with controlling a population somehow ends up about birth control and abortion?  I sometimes wonder if we have missed the hidden agenda behind current efforts on the part of any group to provide reproductive freedom is not in and of itself a means of controlling the people.  The curious thing in all of this, of course, is that those accused of controlling people are only trying to protect the children from those who have no value to them.