For years, the conservatorship of Britney Spears by her father Jamie has played out as a public travesty. Finally given a chance to voice her experience in her own words, the singer got to expose the extent of the vicious control California courts have continued to thrust upon her.
Not only has Jamie Spears abused the normal authorities of a conservator, such as using Britney’s income, some of which was derived from Jamie forcing her to perform, to enrich himself, but he apparently has also refused to let his daughter have her IUD removed and start a family with her longtime boyfriend Sam Asghari.
“This so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have children,” Britney said to a Los Angeles judge during yet another attempt to wrest her conservatorship from her father. “I want to be able to get married and have a baby. I was told right now in the conservatorship I am not able to get married and have a baby.”
This is called forced sterilization. That a court has upheld this abuse of power for over a decade is infuriating. While every aspect of the star’s testimony ought to shock and horrify us, no violation of Britney is more egregious than forcing her to keep an IUD in her body.
IUDs have a near-zero failure rate at preventing pregnancy, and for the majority of the 6 million who choose to use IUDs, they are a safe and effective birth control method that, unlike the pill, you can totally forget about until it needs to be replaced in a few years. But that’s when getting an IUD and choosing to keep it in is a choice. Before going into the obvious horror of denying a woman her bodily autonomy and the opportunity to have a child, it’s worth noting the literal physical pain Britney could be enduring.
About 10% of women who go through the process of getting an IUD inserted, a process reported by 93% of women in a U.K. survey as “extremely painful, almost unbearable, or excruciating,” 43% of respondents choose to get it removed within six months despite its efficacy for multiple years. Although most women experience no or negligible side effects after IUD insertions, more than 1 in 10 report serious pain or discomfort.
And these are just the side effects officially tabulated. Because the IUD has proved such a success with the majority of its users and crucial to lowering our abortion rate (the bulk of the contraception mandate’s benefit in reducing our abortion rate came from its coverage of highly expensive IUDs rather than the pill, which was already cheap), doctors have been loath to find any new faults with them. Check any message board or forum online about IUD side effects, and you’ll find countless women whose doctors refused to consider whether their IUDs caused inexplicable bladder pain or pelvic floor dysfunction, only to have symptoms subside after they’re finally removed. We have no idea what Britney is physically going through, but there’s a chance that on top of the mental anguish of being denied her chance at giving her sons a sibling, she’s also in tremendous physical pain.
By definition, conservatorships must be granted only in cases in which the conservatee is proven in a court of law to be gravely disabled, that is, unable to care for themselves due to old age or serious disability. Britney’s initial conservatorship may have been justified by what we now know was likely a mix of postpartum depression, substance abuse, and unimaginable exhaustion and anxiety from being overworked while tormented by the tabloids. But today, we’re supposed to believe that Britney is well enough to be forced to record and perform music for millions of fans but that she cannot decide whether to get pregnant with the man she wants to marry. For all that the Handmaid’s Tale gets wrongly touted as a talisman for every other societal ill, California letting a man force his daughter to work while enriching himself with the profits while refusing her to start a family is about as close to Gilead-like governance as one can find in the country right now.
It’s Britney’s life and Britney’s body, and she deserves the choice to bring a new life into the world.
