A Greenlandic mother’s one-hour-old baby was removed from her by Danish authorities after she underwent “parenting competence” tests – despite a new law banning the use of the controversial psychometric assessments on people with Greenlandic backgrounds.
wtf is wrong with the Danes
The “parenting competence” tests, known as FKU (forældrekompetenceundersøgelse), were banned on people with Greenlandic backgrounds earlier this year after years of criticism by campaigners and human rights bodies, who argued successfully that the tests were racist because they were culturally unsuitable for people from Inuit backgrounds. As the law came into force in May, campaigners are asking why Brønlund was still subjected to a test.
Emphasis mine.
Brønlund was told that her baby was removed because of the trauma she had suffered at the hands of her adoptive father, who is in prison for sexually abusing her. The municipality told her she was “not Greenlandic enough” for the new law banning the tests to apply, despite her being born in Greenland of Greenlandic parents.
Local authorities started the testing on her in April – after an announcement in January that the ban was coming in. They completed the tests in June, at which point the law was in force. Brønlund was told three weeks before giving birth that her child would be taken away.
Brønlund told the Guardian: “I didn’t want to go into labour because I knew what would happen afterwards. I would keep my baby nearby me when she was in my stomach, that was the closest I would be with her. It was a very rough and horrible time.”
She said her first meeting with her daughter, earlier this week, was cut short early because the baby was believed to be overtired and overstimulated.
“My heart broke when she [the supervisor] stopped the time. I was so sad, I cried out to the car and in the car. It was so fast that we had to leave,” she said, through tears. “My heart is so broken, I don’t know what to do without her.”
Brønlund is allowed to see her baby, under supervision, only once a fortnight for two hours at a time.
Oh hey, it's the same shit the US pulled with throwing indigenous kids into boarding schools that later on turned out to have an alarming amount of child-sized human remains buried on-site. Not to mention the forced sterilizations that were still going on into the late 1970s.
The Danish government's official eugenics program ended in 1963, although involuntary sterilisation of Danish citizens continued until at least 1980. Over ten thousand Danish citizens were sterilised for being "undermålere" which translates roughly to "subpar" (This doesn't count severely mentally disabled people or the visibly disabled, those were sterilised through a different program. It also doesn't cover the Greenlandic programs, those are also separate)
Thousands of inuit women (Girls at the time. As young as 12) through the 60s and 70s were given IUDs without parental consent (And obviously without their own informed consent) and by order of the government. This is of a population measuring about 50000 today.
In both cases the justification given was the preservation of the welfare state.
The Danish state has tried to eradicate both the culture and the population of the Inuits. People who are alive today bore witness to it and were the victims of it and yet we ignore it. The perpetrators are celebrated, their crimes barely a footnote. It deserves little credit, but there is at least a general awareness amongst americans that a wrong was done to the natives of the land they inhabit, Danes seem to believe that the inuits owe them.