Britney Spears’ Reproductive Freedom is a Disability Rights Issue
By Zoe Brennan-Krohn and Rebecca McCray,
ACLU
| 06. 25. 2021
There were many shocking moments in Britney Spears’ 24-minute statement calling for an end to her conservatorship, delivered Wednesday to a Los Angeles probate judge by phone. The pop star, who has lived under a conservatorship chiefly overseen by her father for 13 years, described grueling labor demands, constant surveillance, being cut off from friends, and being confined against her will. As Spears made her case for the judge, one startling detail stood out amidst the laundry list of abuses: Although she would like to have children and be married, her conservators refuse to allow her to have her intrauterine device (IUD) removed, she said, “because they don’t want me to be able to have children.”
Fans, onlookers, and the media seized on this revelation, many expressing shock and dismay that a conservator could require a 39-year-old woman to use birth control against her will. “Britney HAS to keep an IUD in under her conservatorship?” asked one horrified Twitter user. “How is any of this legal/okay?”
Unfortunately, losing your reproductive freedom because you are in a conservatorship is very often...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Peter Aldhous, Scientific American | 07.02.2024
In June a notice posted on the website of the journal Nature set a new scientific record. It withdrew what is now the most highly cited research paper ever to be retracted.
The study, published in 2002 by Catherine Verfaillie...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 07.11.2024
Louise Perry’s recent article in The Spectator cautions against “The quiet return of eugenics,” a threat she locates in preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders. The technology is billed as a way for parents undergoing IVF to select which embryo to implant based on information about each embryo’s genetic risk factors and traits. These reports, she says, give parents “a very full picture of the adult that embryo could become”––from their child’s risk of developing different diseases to their “likely...
By Sara Luterman, The 19th News | 05.23.2024
Historically, the disability and reproductive rights movements have operated separately, “just ignoring each other,” as one advocate put it, as they pursued aims that at times felt contradictory: While one movement fought for full abortion access, the other sought for...