Governing Reproduction: How Danish Welfare Authorities Justified Reproductive Intervention in Kalaallit Nunaat

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how Danish health and welfare authorities framed women in Greenland's (Kalaallit women’s) reproduction as a social problem requiring intervention between 1950 and 1975. Through a socio-legal analysis of 104 pages of archival documents from the Danish National Archives, the study traces the administrative logics that constructed Kalaallit fertility as a governable risk, thereby legitimising the coercive nature of the IUD programme. Mbembe’s necropolitics provides the overarching logic of the analysis, where the sovereign power to define expendable life is exposed. Banakar's RMS (risk management strategies) and Neocleous's preventive governance identify the administrative mechanisms that translated that necropolitical intent into concrete interventions. Together, they show how the IUD programme was not exceptional state violence but a routine administrative response embedded in the ordinary structures of welfare governance. Furthermore, a necropolitical analysis is deployed to show how Danish authorities differentially valued life, treating Kalaallit reproduction as disposable in the pursuit of colonial modernisation. The thesis argues that the IUD programme was not a hidden coercive event within an otherwise benevolent welfare system. It was an expression of that system’s administrative logic extended into a colonial context where the usual guarantees of rights did not apply and Kalaallit women's reproduction became a site of intervention and where sovereign power over life and death operated through bureaucratic routines. By treating reproduction as a technical problem rather than a matter of bodily autonomy, Danish authorities depoliticised coercion, rendering it as rational and necessary. The study contributes to Sociology of Law by demonstrating how welfare governance, which is commonly associated with progress in Denmark, can function as an instrument of racialised colonial control.