COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — More than 350 Greenlandic Indigenous women and girls, including some 12 years old and younger, reported that they were forcibly given contraception by Danish health authorities in cases that date to the 1960s, according to an independent investigation's findings released Tuesday.
The Inuit victims, many of them teenagers at the time, were either fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices, known as IUDs or coils, or given a hormonal birth control injection. They were not told details about the procedure, or did not give their consent.
The victims described traumatic experiences that left some with feelings of shame as well as physical side effects, ranging from pain and bleeding to serious infections.
The governments of Denmark and Greenland officially apologized in a statement last month for their roles in the historic mistreatment in an apparent attempt to get ahead of the highly anticipated report. An official apology event in Greenland's capital is set for Sept. 24.
Nearly 150 Inuit women last year sued Denmark and filed compensation claims against its health ministry, saying Danish health authorities violated their human rights. That case remains ongoing.
While Tuesday's report covers the experiences of more than 350 women who came forward to speak to the investigators, Danish authorities say more than 4,000 women and girls — reportedly half the fertile women in Greenland at the time — received IUDs between the 1960s and mid-1970s.
The alleged purpose was to limit population growth in Greenland by preventing pregnancies. The population on the Arctic island was rapidly increasing at the time because of better living conditions and better health care.
Greenland took over its own health care programs on Jan. 1, 1992.
The investigation’s conclusion comes as Greenland is in the headlines alongside U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly said he seeks U.S. jurisdiction over Greenland. He has not ruled out a military force to take control of the mineral-rich, strategically located Arctic island.
The leaders of Denmark and Greenland say the island is not for sale. Denmark’s foreign minister recently summoned the top U.S. diplomat in the country for talks after the main national broadcaster reported that at least three people with connections to Trump have been carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland.
Greenland, which remains part of the Danish realm, was a colony under Denmark’s crown until 1953, when it became a province in the Scandinavian country. In 1979, the island was granted home rule, and 30 years later Greenland became a self-governing entity.
The forced contraception of Indigenous women and girls was part of centuries of Danish policies that dehumanized Greenlanders and their families.
The policies included the removal of young Inuit children from their parents to be given to Danish foster families for reeducation and controversial parental competency tests that resulted in the forced separation of Greenlandic families.
The investigators received reports from 354 Greenlandic women who were between 48 and 89 years old when they spoke to authorities for the independent investigation, which began June 1, 2023 following a media outcry.
Almost all victims were between 12 and 37 years old at the time. One girl was under 12, but her exact age was not made public in Tuesday's report due to anonymity concerns. The vast majority of the procedures occurred in Greenland.
An attorney representing some of the victims could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
FILE - Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, right, and Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, right, during a statement at Marienborg, Denmark, April 27, 2025. (Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP, file)
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Pessimism about the country's future has risen in cities since last year, but rural America is more optimistic about what's ahead for the U.S., according to a new survey from the American Communities Project.
And despite President Donald Trump’s insistence that crime is out of control in big cities, residents of the nation’s largest metropolitan centers are less likely to list crime and gun violence among the chief concerns facing their communities than they were a couple years ago.
Optimism about the future is also down from last year in areas with large Hispanic communities.
These are some of the snapshots from the new ACP/Ipsos survey, which offers a nuanced look at local concerns by breaking the nation’s counties into community types, using data points like race, income, age and religious affiliation. The survey evaluated moods and priorities across the 15 different community types, such as heavily Hispanic areas, big cities and different kinds of rural communities.
The common denominator across the communities? A gnawing worry about daily household costs.
“Concerns about inflation are across the board,” said Dante Chinni, founder and director of ACP. “One thing that truly unites the country is economic angst.”
Rural residents are feeling more upbeat about the country's trajectory — even though most aren't seeing Trump's promised economic revival.
The $15 price tag on a variety pack of Halloween candy at the Kroger supermarket last month struck Carl Gruber. Disabled and receiving federal food aid, the 42-year-old from Newark, Ohio, had hardly been oblivious to lingering, high supermarket prices.
But Gruber, whose wife also is unable to work, is hopeful about the nation's future, primarily in the belief that prices will moderate as Trump suggests.
“Right now, the president is trying to get companies who moved their businesses out of the country to move them back,” said Gruber, a Trump voter whose support has wavered over the federal shutdown that delayed his monthly food benefit. “So, maybe we'll start to see prices come down.”
About 6 in 10 residents of Rural Middle America — Newark's classification in the survey — say they are hopeful about the country's future over the next few years, up from 43% in the 2024 ACP survey. Other communities, like heavily evangelical areas or working-class rural regions, have also seen an uptick in optimism.
Kimmie Pace, a 33-year-old unemployed mother of four from a small town in northwest Georgia, said, “I have anxiety every time I go to the grocery store.”
But she, too, is hopeful in Trump. “Trump’s in charge, and I trust him, even if we’re not seeing the benefits yet,” she said.
By contrast, the share of big-city residents who say they are hopeful about the nation's future has shrunk, from 55% last year to 45% in the new survey.
Robert Engel of San Antonio — Texas' booming, second most-populous city — is worried about what's next for the U.S., though less for his generation than the next. The 61-year-old federal worker, whose employment was not interrupted by the government shutdown nor Trump's effort to reduce the federal workforce, is near retirement and feels financially stable.
A stable job market, health care availability and a fair economic environment for his adult children are his main priorities.
Recently, the inflation outlook has worsened under Trump. Consumer prices in September increased at an annual rate of 3%, up from 2.3% in April, when the president first began to roll out substantial tariff increases that burdened the economy with uncertainty.
Engel's less-hopeful outlook for the country is broader. “It's not just the economy, but the state of democracy and polarization,” Engel said. “It's a real worry. I try to be cautiously optimistic, but it's very, very hard.”
Trump had threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he said was runaway, urban crime.
Yet data shows most violent crime in those places, and around the country, has declined in recent years. That tracks with the poll, which found that residents of America's Big Cities and Middle Suburbs are less likely to list crime or gun violence among the top issues facing their communities than they were in 2023.
For Angel Gamboa, a retired municipal worker in Austin, Texas, Trump's claims don't ring true in the city of roughly 1 million people.
“I don't want to say it's overblown, because crime is a serious subject," Gamboa said. “But I feel like there's an agenda to scare Americans, and it's so unnecessary.”
Instead, residents of Big Cities are more likely to say immigration and health care are important issues for their communities.
Big Cities are one of the community types where residents are most likely to say they’ve seen changes in immigration recently, with 65% saying they’ve seen a change in their community related to immigration over the past 12 months, compared with only about 4 in 10 residents of communities labeled in the survey as Evangelical Hubs or Rural Middle America.
Gamboa says he has witnessed changes, notably outside an Austin Home Depot, where day laborers regularly would gather in the mornings to find work.
Not anymore, he said.
“Immigrants were not showing up there to commit crimes," Gamboa said. "They were showing up to help their families. But when ICE was in the parking lot, that's all it took to scatter people who were just trying to find a job.”
After Hispanic voters moved sharply toward Trump in the 2024 election, the poll shows that residents of heavily Hispanic areas are feeling worse about the future of their communities than they were before Trump was elected.
Carmen Maldonado describes her community of Kissimmee, Florida, a fast-growing, majority-Hispanic city of about 80,000 residents about 22 miles (35 kilometers) south of Orlando, as “seriously troubled.”
The 61-year-old retired, active-duty National Guard member isn't alone. The survey found that 58% of residents of such communities are hopeful about the future of their community, down from 78% last year.
“It's not just hopelessness, but fear,” said Maldonado, who says people in her community — even her fellow native Puerto Ricans, who are American citizens — are anxious about the Trump administration's aggressive pursuit of Latino immigrants.
Just over a year ago, Trump made substantial inroads with Hispanic voters in the 2024 presidential election.
Beyond just the future of their communities, Hispanic respondents are also substantially less likely to say they’re hopeful about the future of their children or the next generation: 55% this year, down from 69% in July 2024.
Maldonado worries that the Trump administration's policies have stoked anti-Hispanic attitudes and that they will last for her adult child's lifetime and beyond.
“My hopelessness comes from the fact that we are a large part of what makes up the United States,” she said, “and sometimes I cry thinking about these families.”
Parwani and Thomson-DeVeaux reported from Washington.
The American Communities Project/Ipsos Fragmentation Study of 5,489 American adults aged 18 or older was conducted from Aug. 18 - Sept. 4, 2025, using the Ipsos probability-based online panel and RDD telephone interviews. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach Fla., on his way back to the White House, Sunday, Nov. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
