Giving birth in Greenland means a month away from home | Polarjournal
It is here at Queen Ingrid’ Hospital in Nuuk that the majority of Greenlandic births take place. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

When Greenlandic women in remotely located towns are pregnant they have to leave family, friends, and familiar surroundings behind to go on stressful and lonely “birthing trips”. But, in the end, safety weighs higher than comfort.

“It’s always a dilemma for them,” midwife and researcher Ingelise Olesen told PolarJournal.

“I admit that I don’t know anyone there [in the town where she will give birth, ed.], and that I have no family or acquaintances there, and that I don’t know what I will do when I get there.”

These are the words of a pregnant woman from a small town in Greenland. They are from a September report on births in Greenland published by the Centre for Public Health in Greenland; a report which contains many similar statements. Another woman, who had already given birth, said:

“In fact, the day before I had to travel I was really sad, and I had never been that sad during my entire pregnancy.”

And a man, whose wife had to leave to give birth, said:

“It can be very overwhelming. Especially the fact that my wife has to leave three weeks before, right in the period when she’s most vulnerable. None of us are looking forward to her being alone, and it is very uncertain what will happen there.”

Giving birth in Greenland can be a lonely experience, indeed. Currently, only five towns in the country have proper facilities and personnel to conduct births. Consequently, almost half of annual births in Greenland involve traveling to strange and unfamiliar surroundings.

In 2021, for instance, 766 children were born in Greenland. About 500 of these were born in Nuuk, and from the 500 born in Nuuk, about 250 of them were born to mothers who had traveled in from other towns. At the other birthing centers around the country (Ilulissat, Sisimiut, Qaqortoq, and Tasiilaq), mothers traveled in from smaller towns as well, although the amount there is less certain.

This map shows the five locations where women gave birth in Greenland in 2021. The first number ‘fødsler’ indicates the total number of births in the given location, while the number in the brackets indicates the percentage of the total number of births in the entire country. Image : Ole Ellekrog

Not how you imagine it

And giving birth without your loved ones can be a distressing experience. It adds extra stress to the already stressful life event that giving birth is. In fact, some women are more stressed by their trip than by giving birth.

“For some women, worries about their “birthing trip” are greater than worries about the birth itself. They worry about traveling alone, about traveling home with a newborn, about leaving their husbands, and about leaving their other children behind,” Ingelise Olesen, the woman behind the recent report on births in Greenland, told PolarJournal.

Aside from being Research Coordinator at Centre for Public Health in Greenland, Ingelise Olesen is also a midwife. So, she knows firsthand the lasting effects that giving birth away from home can have.

“The consequences are that the women are alone and sometimes feel lonely. Giving birth is a family event that is important for the connection between the father and the child, the mother and the child, and sometimes the siblings. Giving birth alone is not how most people imagine it,” she said.

“This joy of giving birth and sharing it with others is then sometimes moved to the airport when the women return home.”

Furthermore, one woman in Ingelise Olesen’s report mentions that a lot of identity is built around the place you are born, not just the place you grow up. Many don’t identify as “someone born in Nuuk”.

Safety before comfort

The phenomenon of “birthing trips” in Greenland is not a new one. Since the 1970s, women from Greenland’s smallest towns have had to travel to give birth. And in 2002, as stricter requirements for birth facilities were put in place, the number of places where giving birth is possible was reduced to the five current locations.

In that time, it has become a lot safer to give birth in Greenland. In 1970, there were around 34 stillborns out of every 1000 births, and in 2019 this number had fallen to around 13. With current data, though, it is not possible to determine how much of this fall can be attributed to the centralized birthing centers and their higher safety standards.

So, although giving birth without your loved ones might seem distressing, in a country with Greenland’s geography, it is the lesser of two evils. Given the choice of giving birth in their own small towns without doctors or midwives present, almost all women choose to travel to hospital towns. In the end, safety beats comfort.

“The most important finding from our report was that women want to give birth where they live but, at the same time, they also want experienced personnel present. It’s always a dilemma for them,” Ingelise Olesen told Polar Journal.

No flights while in labor

And not only is traveling far away from home a necessary evil, staying away for almost an entire month is also non-negotiable.

“Births are unpredictable. You never really know when a birth starts. It could happen two weeks before or two weeks after the due date. Additionally, there are rules against flying during the last weeks of pregnancy, exactly because births are unpredictable. So it has to be three to four weeks before the due date,” Ingelise Olesen said.

In Greenland, some women are more worried about the trip they have to take to give birth, than they are about the birth itself. Image: This image was generated with AI on the basis of this article by the DALL-E software from OpenAI

The flights to the hospital as well as lodgings in the weeks before are paid for by the Greenlandic health care system. But partners and other loved-ones who want to come along, have to do so at their own expense. Many cannot afford this, which is why some women end up giving birth without familiar faces around.

An Arctic problem

Greenland’s “birthing trips” may be a necessary evil but, still, there are ways to improve the current situation. Ingelise Olesen’s report has a number of concrete recommendations on how to do this.

These include:

  • Paying for the partner’s trip as well as the mother,
  • Providing better waiting facilities for pregnant women in airports,
  • Providing care packages with diapers, clothing, etc,
  • Paying for a hotel room for mothers and newborns, if they have to wait longer than six hours for transit in airports.

And maybe this advice should be extended to other Inuit communities across the Arctic, since, according to the report, issues with centralized birthing centers have been recorded in Canada as well.

In Nunavik, for instance, so-called “Community Birthing Centres” have been created, recognizing the important cultural event that giving birth is, while in Manitoba a “Bring Births Home” movement has arisen for similar reasons.

Ole Ellekrog, PolarJournal

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