Bronlund’s efforts to get her baby back have rallied supporters and sparked protests, becoming another sore spot in Denmark’s long and complicated relationship with Greenland.
The case has unfolded at a busy time for Greenland, a gigantic island straddling the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans that US President Donald Trump has vowed to get “one way or the other”. Taking it over, Trump says, is crucial for American security.
Denmark, in turn, has been scrambling to keep Greenlanders on its side. It is suddenly doing all sorts of things that Greenlanders had been demanding for years. One of them was changing the parental competency test, which is referred to by one long word in Danish: the Forældrekompetenceundersøgelse. Another has been to address historical misdeeds.
Just this past week, Danish and Greenlandic researchers released a scathing 347-page report that detailed the Danish government’s past campaign of forcing contraception on a whole generation of Greenlandic women and girls, some as young as 12 and many kept in the dark about what was being done to them. The Danish prime minister even offered a long-awaited official apology for this and other wrongs done to Greenland.
Activists say that Bronlund’s case is proof of how the wrongs never seem to end, especially when it comes to Greenlandic women.
“History is simply repeating itself,” said Najannguaq Hegelund, vice chair of Sila 360, an organisation focusing on Indigenous peoples’ rights, based in Denmark. She called the case “colonial wreckage”, saying it was evidence of the stubborn stereotype that Greenlanders cannot take care of their own children.
Greenlanders have long complained that the parental competency tests are unfair.Credit: Getty Images
“It is so embedded in Danish society that Greenlandic parents are automatically defined as unfit,” she said.
Bronlund’s ordeal started in December, when she was 17 and found out that she was pregnant. She went for a scan and saw “a tiny heart beating – that was incredible”, she said.
She wondered whether having an abortion would damage something in her body that might prevent her from having children down the road.
“All of that was running through my mind,” she said. “But most of all, I just couldn’t bear the thought of killing the fetus. So I decided to keep it.”
‘It is so embedded in Danish society that Greenlandic parents are automatically defined as unfit.’
Najannguaq Hegelund, vice chair of Sila 360
According to documents she shared with The New York Times, the Children and Youth Committee in her municipality, west of Copenhagen, started a welfare investigation in January.
Bronlund said she was subjected to interviews with psychologists, meetings with social workers, standardised psychological evaluations and IQ tests that measured her ability to manipulate shapes and do math problems, which she says she was never good at. Traditionally, the parenting investigations involved a series of interviews and standardised tests.
Municipal authorities declined to discuss details of Bronlund’s case, citing privacy concerns.
Ivana Bronlund with her mother, Gitte Bronlund.Credit: Hilary Swift/The New York Times
Bronlund never fit into a neat category, she says. She was born in Greenland, adopted by a couple who moved to mainland Denmark, and dropped out of school in the seventh grade. She was working as a babysitter and played on Greenland’s national youth handball team. When she was growing up, she was sexually abused by her father. He was eventually convicted and sent to prison, where he remains.
The paperwork said that she was treated as any other Dane and not as a Greenlander because she was “raised in Danish culture and with Danish language”.
Authorities across Denmark use parenting tests, but they are not applied to the entire population – only to families in which there are already welfare concerns. Denmark has recently strengthened child protection laws and, as a result, made it easier for the state to override a parent and even remove their child from their home.
The new rules about how these assessments should be applied to the Greenlandic community in Denmark took effect in May, when Bronlund was six months pregnant. Under the new rules, standardised psychological tests should no longer be used; instead, Greenlandic families are supposed to undergo specialised screenings that are more culturally sensitive.
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That didn’t happen, and in June, she was called in for a meeting.
She met with a psychologist, bracing for the evaluation. The psychologist delivered her recommendation: that Bronlund’s baby be taken away from her after birth.
Bronlund said she was in shock at the news, and just sat in a room and cried.
“She said I couldn’t provide what the child needed,” she remembered in an interview, “and that I wasn’t ready to be a mother.”
According to the documents, the evaluation team concluded that she was “not able to ensure her child’s well-being and development” and that she had “a great need for extensive psychiatric and social support”, which her family believes is an unfair conclusion based on the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.
She and the activists who have amassed around her believe that the judgment is wrong on many levels.
“Her father did something to her years ago, and now she has to pay?” said Maria Rubin Nicolajsen, a volunteer in Bronlund’s community who helps families navigate the bureaucracy.
Nicolajsen shared these thoughts at a small protest earlier this month outside the municipal government’s headquarters, complete with megaphones, posters and a carton of iced tea as a refreshment.
“[Bronlund is] a very sweet girl. She doesn’t drink. She doesn’t smoke. Nothing,” Nicolajsen said. “And she’s fighting for her baby. Isn’t that what you want a good mother to do?”
Bronlund continues to pump milk. She gets up in the middle of the night to do it. Every other week, she is allowed a two-hour visit with her baby, whom she has named Aviaja-Luuna.
She has appealed her case, and on Tuesday, a national board will review the findings. Denmark’s minister for social affairs and housing, Sophie Hæstorp Andersen, has already stated that “a severe mistake has been made”, saying that local authorities failed to follow the new law.
Local authorities said, in the paperwork that the family shared with the Times, that they applied a standardised psychological test to Bronlund, “which was not in line” with the new policy.
“Such tests should not be used in cases involving Greenlandic families,” the local officials wrote, and “the municipality regrets this error”.
But the municipal officials said, in the documents, that they didn’t rely purely on the tests and even without them, they would still have had a “sufficient basis” to put the baby in foster care. Local authorities said they relied on many inputs to reach their conclusion, including interviews with Bronlund and a referral from the police.
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If she loses her appeal, Bronlund has no feasible way to keep the baby in her family. If her mother took the baby, she said she was told, she would have to move out. She declined to comment on the baby’s father, and in the documents shared with the Times, there is no mention of him.
Bronlund said the hardest part of the whole experience was the moment she said goodbye to her daughter.
Two people from the municipality walked into the delivery room.
They were dressed in white.
They said she had one hour left with her baby and then she would have to give her over to a foster couple.
“It was the best hour of my life,” Bronlund said. “I held her and felt her against me.”
She whispered to her child that she loved her more than anything on Earth and that she would fight for her every day, day and night.
And then she wrapped her in a blanket, handed Aviaja-Luuna to her mother and watched her baby be carried away.
