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.
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.
I was shocked when I read that in the New York Times yesterday morning. (The test is also no longer lawful.) In Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputians believe “that parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children”. And so children are taken away and put into schools with “professors well skilled in preparing children for such a condition of life as befits the rank of their parents, and their own capacities, as well as inclinations.” They at least waited until the child was twenty months old. Some people read this passage as Swift approving the scheme. But it seems to me to be satirical.
One wonders how close to the Lilliputian “ideal” the Danish government will get. Not all utopias are to be hoped for. The article goes on.
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.
The Lilliputian scheme, by the way, is perhaps something that Smith had in mind when he wrote this, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
The education of boys at distant great schools, of young men at distant colleges, of young ladies in distant nunneries and boarding-schools, seems, in the higher ranks of life, to have hurt most essentially the domestic morals, and consequently the domestic happiness, both of France and England. Do you wish to educate your children to be dutiful to their parents, to be kind and affectionate to their brothers and sisters? put them under the necessity of being dutiful children, of being kind and affectionate brothers and sisters: educate them in your own house. From their parent’s house they may, with propriety and advantage, go out every day to attend public schools: but let their dwelling be always at home. Respect for you must always impose a very useful restraint upon their conduct; and respect for them may frequently impose no useless restraint upon your own. Surely no acquirement, which can possibly be derived from what is called a public education, can make any sort of compensation for what is almost certainly and necessarily lost by it. Domestic education is the institution of nature; public education, the contrivance of man. It is surely unnecessary to say, which is likely to be the wisest.
Smith’s wisdom is easy to appreciate, but some groups in this world will always find Yahoos who require their rule. Everyone thinks they are Brobdingnag.
I hope Denmark does the right thing.
Henry, This story is true, and it's bad, and it's not uncommon, still, as you cite. A better source for that than the New York Times is this from the Council on Foreign Relations: https://www.cfr.org/blog/women-week-denmark-issues-apology-greenland-over-forced-sterilization .
The Danish state did much worse things than this in the last century: not only as regards the treatment of the Greenlanders, but also as regards eugenics in the service of social engineering.
https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-countries
These stories are slow to be discussed here because they are taboo, and also because Danes are taught in school that a highly developed welfare state is by definition progressive and therefore virtuous. But most Western countries have ghastly episodes hiding in the closet - especially with regard to eugenics, disability, unmarried pregnancies, and racial policies. I don't think Denmark deserves extra castigation for illiberalism and official racism just because of the idiotic books people publish about Danish happiness and hygge. The Danes can't really be blamed for those.