Reporting on the homey domestic front of the War Against Women, the NYTimes discovers “Sabotage of Birth Control“:
Men who abuse women physically and emotionally may also sabotage their partners’ birth control, pressuring them to become pregnant against their will, new reports suggest.
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Several small studies have described this kind of coercion among low-income teenagers and young adults with a history of violence by intimate partners. Now, a report being released Tuesday by the federally financed National Domestic Violence Hotline says 1 in 4 women who agreed to answer questions after calling the hot line said a partner had pressured them to become pregnant, told them not to use contraceptives, or forced them to have unprotected sex.
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The hot line’s report did not include a comparison group and did not gather information about the participants, who were questioned anonymously; nor was it published in a peer-reviewed journal. It was based on answers to four questions posed to 3,169 women around the country who contacted the domestic violence hot line between Aug. 16 and Sept. 26, 2010, who were not in immediate danger and who agreed to participate. About 6,800 callers refused to answer the questions.
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Of those who did respond, about a quarter said yes to one or more of these three questions: “Has your partner or ex ever told you not to use any birth control?” “Has your partner or ex-partner ever tried to force or pressure you to become pregnant?” “Has your partner or ex ever made you have sex without a condom so that you would get pregnant?”
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One in six answered yes to the question “Has your partner or ex-partner ever taken off the condom during sex so that you would get pregnant?”
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The questions were devised by Dr. Elizabeth Miller, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Davis, whose earlier papers on reproductive coercion prompted interest in the subject.
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“It’s really important to recognize reproductive coercion as another mechanism for control in an unhealthy relationship,” Dr. Miller said.
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Dr. Miller’s paper, published last year in the journal Contraception, reported that at five family planning clinics in Northern California, one-third of 683 female patients whose partners were physically abusive said the men had also pressured them to become pregnant or had sabotaged their birth control. Of 191 women who reported birth control sabotage, 79 percent also reported physical abuse, the study found…
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Ms. James, of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, said that despite the new attention to reproductive coercion, she doubted it was a new phenomenon.
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“I just think not enough people have been asking the question,” she said.
What’s the difference between the ignorant low-class thugs using forced pregnancy as a brutalizing tactic as effective as a fist to the face, and the pious legislators promoting “heartbeat laws” and telling hospitals to let women with ectopic pregnancies bleed to death? Just that the legislators don’t run even the slightest risk of going to jail when their victims die.
