Why Britney Spears’ IUD experience feels so personal

When 23-year-old Danielle Fauteux heard about Spears’s comment, she thought about her own IUD. After insertion, she said, the device was so painful that she couldn’t stand up. For three weeks, she said, she thought about calling her OB/GYN and making an appointment to have it removed. While the pain eventually subsided, she said, she can’t imagine how she would have felt if she didn’t have the option to take it out.

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If someone else was controlling the process, she said, “I would have felt so violated.”

Fauteux’s roommate, 23-year-old Paige Pope, also said she was initially shocked by Spears’s IUD experience, because she hadn’t understood the full extent of her father’s power as a conservator. But the shock quickly wore off, she said.

“After a few minutes I was like, ‘No, this makes sense, because our rights are always up for grabs.’ ”

Although Pope does feel empowered to make her own reproductive choices, her empowerment is “limited,” she said, because it’s entirely dependent on geography. She lives in New York City, where abortion is widely available. If she lived in a more conservative state, she added, it would be a different story.

Certain aspects of Spears’s experience feel familiar, said Leigh Senderowicz, a social demographer at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who studies reproductive coercion.

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Reproductive coercion, the act of controlling someone else’s reproductive health, has a long history in the United States, Senderowicz said. The medical and legal systems, she said, have worked together to try to control women’s reproductive choices, especially the choices of women deemed less worthy or capable of having children, including women of colour, disabled women and women with mental health conditions.

“It’s not happening because of individual doctors or nurses or individual conservators,” she said. “The idea that some people should reproduce and some people shouldn’t is baked into our institutions.”

Although the term “eugenics” fell out of fashion after it was embraced by the Nazis in World War II, Senderowicz said, the underlying sentiment has endured. In the 1960s, Fannie Lou Hamer and many other Black women in the South underwent forced sterilisation, a procedure that became known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Black women would go to the doctor for another procedure and be sterilised without their knowledge or consent, Senderowicz said. More recently, she said, there have been allegations of forced sterilisation at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities along the US Mexico border.

Doctors may also be reluctant to remove IUDs and implants when patients ask them to, Senderowicz said. Some feel strongly that it’s a superior type of birth control, she said, providing contraceptive coverage regardless of user behaviour. If a patient complains of side effects with her IUD, Senderowicz added, some doctors might suggest they try other things to treat the side effects independently, rather than removing the IUD, even if that was the explicit request. Outside the United States, doctors are sometimes more forceful, she said. Senderowicz has studied trends in sub-Saharan Africa, where she says some doctors will outright refuse to remove a patient’s IUD early.

“You don’t need a doctor to stop taking the pill. You don’t need a doctor to stop using condoms. But you do need a doctor for these methods,” Senderowicz said. In this way, she said, IUDs can be a vehicle for reproductive coercion – as Spears’s comments suggest.

Since Pope heard about Spears’s IUD, she said, she’s been thinking about all the other people who might be experiencing something similar – people who don’t have the kind of status or platform that has allowed Spears to share her story. Those women, she said, might find themselves trapped in these situations forever, unable to control their own bodies.

The whole thing has “’Handmaid’s Tale vibes,” Pope said. In the book, by Margaret Atwood, “handmaids” exist to bear children for the man in their family unit. The man dictates everything about their lives, including their bodies and reproductive health.

For Pope, the hearing is a turning point: “Now I hope she can finally be Britney Spears again.”

Washington Post

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