The #FreeBritney movement has wider implications for abortion rights
The first Abortion Rights Chair Anne Kane writes on Britney Spears’ conservatorship and looks at the wider implications for reproductive choice.
The blurb for Abortion Rights’ meeting on 21st September asked, ‘Why did it take the case of Britney – someone internationally famous – to bring to attention the brutal reproductive control many women are subjected to?’
The answer must lie in the massive legal and social inequalities, which have worsened over the last two pandemic years, with rising inequality even in life expectancy, in this country – and huge drops internationally in women’s jobs and incomes, rising care demands and rises in violence against women, among other things. And it must lie in turn in the prejudice and ideologies which are inherent in these factors and which these inequalities in turn strengthen.
Specifically, what has happened to Britney Spears draws attention to the issues of impairment and disablism – Britney’s case is a disability rights issue as well as a women’s issue.
Despite many struggles and advances, disability prejudice remains ingrained in our societies and to an extent hides and normalises abuse. It also allows many people to tolerate and emotionally cut off from things that they might otherwise recognise as abuse, and which they might otherwise protest – as has happened in Britney’s case. Apart from supporting Britney’s rights to reproductive freedom for itself, we need to publicise the case (as Abortion Rights has done) because it draws attention to equal injustices applied to millions of women worldwide. Of the 1.3 million conservatorships – which it should be recalled is an extreme procedure where a court rules an individual lacks decision-making capacity and, whatever that person wishes, this is transferred to another person or persons – in the US, many are applied to disabled people.
Things have got much worse for disabled people in the last few years. Under Covid, disabled people saw ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ orders routinely placed without their consent; disabled people were much more likely to die of Covid and they saw their deaths counting for less – they were the people with ‘underlying conditions’, justified away in daily news briefings. But even before Covid the situation was so bad that the UN had condemned the British government for ‘grave and systematic violations of disabled peoples’ human rights’. Although basic anti-discrimination rights were won in the 1990s, they are not well enforced and have been systematically undermined.
We continue to feel the long reach of eugenics – although not as all-pervasive as in the late 19th & early 20th century, eugenics continues to be recognisable across our societies. Eugenics attributes responsibility for the results of social conditions on genetics – control reproduction and the so-called ‘racial stock’ will be better, the argument goes. So, a real intertwining of misogyny, disablism and racism.
In the US, historically, this took the form of laws against reproduction by methods including:
- legally forbidding certain marriages:
- incarcerating disabled people so they were unable to reproduce, and
- legalising forcible sterilisation
Hence, you could have a situation where Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled in 1927 (in Buck v Bell) that ‘it is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.’ This ruling upheld (on a vote of 8 to 1 justices) the right of the state of Virginia to forcibly sterilise Carrie Buck, who had been committed to an institution at the age of 17 labelled with ‘moral imbecility’ (a term also used in Britain and only superceded in 1959). Carrie had given birth to a child out of marriage. Even after a contrary ruling in 1942 forcible sterilisations continued, with women in institutions such as psychiatric hospitals particularly at risk.
An estimated 70,000 forcible sterilisations took place in the US in the 20th century, although this may be a considerable underestimate. More recently, in the US there have been allegations of forced sterilisation in immigration detention centres and prisons. Agreement to sterilisation has been optioned in plea bargaining sentences, continuing an abusive historical trend.
In Britain, while attempts to legislate for compulsory sterilisation (reaching a height in the 1930s) were unsuccessful, eugenicist views were highly influential. The arguments used in the parliamentary debates in favour of sterilisation in the 1930s are an eerie echo of the arguments used to support conservatorships today: people are viewed as incapable of making decisions for themselves and so compulsion – in the most extreme forms – is acceptable. Although forcible sterilisation was not backed by legislation in Britain, disabled people have been subjected to brutal forms of reproductive control, including through court ordered sterilisation.
The mass incarceration of disabled people was used as a way to prevent reproduction – of course historically, as now, disabled people in institutions are subject to massive sexual, physical and emotional violence. Society functions in a state of denial about this: abuse is often so extreme it is difficult to acknowledge and for individual people, their families or support networks, deeply traumatising. Until the 1980s it was the norm for many disabled people to be locked away in institutions from early childhood. Massive funding cuts now mean hard won independent living is being removed and once again disabled people are being incarcerated against their will.
The influence of eugenics in the early birth control movement via individuals like Marie Stopes is a history the pro-choice movement has had to understand and reject to ensure we represent the rights of all women, including disabled women, to real reproductive choices. Such choices need to be both in law and in practice, to ensure that women are not coerced explicitly or by social expectation, practical support or the lack of it.
Britney may or may not see herself as a disabled person, but the denial of choice, of the right to personal self-determination, of control over basic elements of life is exactly what is happening all the time via conservatorships and via much else to disabled women every day, here, in the US and elsewhere and in growing numbers.
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