IS BRITNEY SPEARS 'ALLEGED FORCED CONTRACEPTION LEGAL?
Among the surprising claims pop star Britney Spears made to a Los Angeles probate judge this week as she sought to end her lengthy guardianship was one that deeply shook experts on guardianship and reproductive rights law. She said that a team led by her father, who is her guardian, prevented him from having her IUD removed because the team did not want her to have any more children.
"Forcing someone to use contraception against their will is a violation of basic human rights and bodily autonomy, as is forcing someone to become pregnant or become pregnant against their will," said Ruth Dawson, Associate Chief Policy Officer at the Guttmacher Institute. , a research group that supports reproductive rights.
Court-approved mandatory contraception is rare in guardianship. But the specter it generates - forced sterilization - has a long and grim history in the United States, especially against poor women, women of color, and inmates. In the early 1900s, the United States Supreme Court upheld the state-sanctioned practice.
Although the court moved away from that position in the 1940s and a consensus emerged through the growing canon on informed consent that forced sterilization was inhumane, the practice continued to be quietly tolerated.
Finally, by the late 1970s, most states had repealed laws authorizing sterilization, although reports of forced hysterectomies and tubal ligation among women in immigration detention centers continue to emerge. It wasn't until 2014 that California formally banned the sterilization of female inmates without consent.
he scant statute on the guardianship issue indicates how unusual the Spears case may be. In 1985, the California Supreme Court denied the petition of the guardian parents of a 29-year-old woman with Down syndrome who wanted her to undergo a tubal libation.
Generally, a conservator has temporary control over the finances and even the medical care of an incapacitated person. The experts stressed that Ms Spears' claim is not verified. But if it's accurate, they said, the most likely, albeit suspicious, reason could be that Jamie Spears, her father, wants to protect his finances from the father of a baby, potentially her boyfriend, who reportedly disagrees with Spears.
If a guardian fears that a ward will make financially unwise decisions, "the remedy is not to say they cannot procreate," said Sylvia Law, a health law scholar at New York University School of Law. "It is indescribable."
According to fiduciary and estate law experts, the handful of cases in which a guardian, usually a parent, has asked a court to order contraception involved children with severe disabilities.
"Such a child would lack the ability to understand that a penis and vagina can produce a baby," said Bridget J. Crawford, an expert in guardianship law at Pace University School of Law. "And that's certainly not the case with Britney Spears."
Eugenics was one of the main reasons for female sterilization. In the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court upheld the right to sterilize a “feeble-minded” woman who had been committed to a state mental institution, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing infamously: “Three generations of jerks is enough. "
Although the opinion was never formally reversed, in a 1942 case, Skinner v. Oklahoma, which challenged the forced sterilization of certain convicted criminals, Judge William O. Douglas, writing to a unanimous court, said that the right to procreate was fundamental. . "Any experiment the state conducts is to its irreparable harm," he wrote. "He is forever deprived of a basic freedom."
While Ms. Spears has not been sterilized, Crawford said, if she is prevented from having her IUD removed, that would be a substitute for sterilization, particularly since she testified that she wanted more children.
Melissa Murray, who teaches reproductive rights and constitutional law at New York University School of Law, pointed to another puzzling element in the indictment of Spears, who, at 39, has been under the tutelage of her father for 13 years. Ms. Murray said that Ms. Spears, an adult, appeared to be living a legally constructed childhood.
"It's unusual for her father to be making the kinds of decisions that we would expect a parent to make for a teenager," she added.
