Ivana Bronlund is a mother without a child.
An hour after her daughter was born in a small town in Denmark, the government took her baby.
She continues to pump milk that someone picks up and carries to the infant. She stares out the large, square windows of her apartment building and constantly imagines holding her again.
“I just wish I’d been given the chance to prove that I can be a mother,” she says.
Bronlund is 18 and comes from a home with a history of abuse. So Danish authorities subjected her to an extensive parental competency test that is intended to protect children but has been criticised as a harsh overreach into family life.
She is also Greenlandic, and Greenlanders have long complained that these tests are unfair. A recent study found that Greenlandic children born in Denmark are five times more likely to be taken away from their parents compared with other children in Denmark.
Denmark, which controls Greenland as an overseas territory, has tried to address this. Earlier this year, while Bronlund was pregnant, the Danish parliament voted to modify how the parenting tests were applied to Greenlandic families.
But for reasons that still remain unclear, Bronlund wasn’t treated as the new law requires, which local officials have described as an “error”. An appeals hearing was held Tuesday, though no decision was made.
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, says Trump, 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,” says Najannguaq Hegelund, vice-chairwoman 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.
“It is so embedded in Danish society that Greenlandic parents are automatically defined as unfit,” she says.
Bronlund’s ordeal started in December, when she was 17 and found out she was pregnant. She went for a scan and saw “a tiny heart beating – that was incredible”, she says.
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 says. “But most of all, I just couldn’t bear the thought of killing the foetus. So I decided to keep it.”
According to documents, the Children and Youth Committee in her municipality, west of Copenhagen, started a welfare investigation in January.
Bronlund says 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 maths problems, which she says she was never good at. Traditionally the parenting investigations involved a series of interviews and standardised tests.
Authorities declined to discuss details of Bronlund’s case, citing privacy concerns.
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.
She’s fighting for her baby. Isn’t that what you want a good mother to do?
— Maria Rubin Nicolajsen, a volunteer in Bronlund’s community
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.
That didn’t happen, and in June she was called in for a meeting.
She met a psychologist, bracing for the evaluation. The psychologist delivered her recommendation: that Bronlund’s baby be taken away from her after birth.
Bronlund was in shock at the news, and just sat in a room and cried.
“She said I couldn’t provide what the child needed, and that I wasn’t ready to be a mother,” she says.
According to the documents, the evaluation team concluded that she was “not able to ensure her child’s wellbeing 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?” says 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,” says Nicolajsen. “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 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 has shared, 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 have 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.
If she loses her appeal, Bronlund has no feasible way to keep the baby in her family. If her mother takes the baby, she says she has been told, she will have to move out. She declined to comment on the baby’s father.
Bronlund says 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,” says Bronlund. “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. – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
