In an open court hearing on Wednesday, pop icon Britney Spears spoke out about the details of the 13-year conservatorship that she’s been living under since 2014.
Among the things Spears revealed were that she’d allegedly been forced to take lithium, had been prohibited from seeing her friends, and, in one of the most shocking revelations, that she’d been kept from having her IUD taken out.
“I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” Spears said during her testimony. “I was told right now in the conservatorship I am not able to get married or have a baby.”
She told the court that she wants her IUD removed so she could “start trying to have another baby, but 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, any more children.”
What Spears described is reproductive coercion, a term that refers to anything from an attempt to impregnate someone against their will or without their knowledge to interference with a person’s contraception methods, states the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ website.
Reproductive coercion often involves a person’s intimate partner, but in this case, it’s Spears’s conservators (including her father, Jamie Spears) who are allegedly interfering with her reproductive freedoms.
“Reproductive coercion is reprehensible, no matter what form it takes — including preventing a person from seeking care to remove a contraceptive device from their own body.
Everyone has the right to make these most intimate of decisions of if and when to have children,” Ruth Dawson, the principal policy associate at Guttmacher Institute said in a statement to Refinery29.
“Forcing someone to be on birth control against their will is a violation of basic human rights and bodily autonomy, just as forcing someone to become or stay pregnant against their will would be.”