Is the Forced Contraception Alleged by Britney Spears Legal?

Among the astounding claims pop star Britney Spears made this week before a probate judge in Los Angeles as she attempted to complete her lengthy restoration was one that profoundly shook experts on guardianship and reproductive rights. She said a team led by her father, who is her conservator, prevented her from having her IUD removed because the team didn’t want her to have more children.

“Forcing someone to use birth control against their will is a violation of basic human rights and physical autonomy, just as it would be to force someone to get or stay pregnant against their will,” said Ruth Dawson, Principal Policy Associate at Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports reproductive rights.

Court-approved forced contraception is rare in conservatories. But the specter it conjures up – forced sterilization – has a grim, long history in the United States, particularly against poor women, women of color, and inmates. At the beginning of the 20th century, the state-sanctioned practice was upheld by the United States Supreme Court.

Although the court moved away from this position in the 1940s and the growing consent canon gave rise to consensus that forced sterilization was inhuman, the practice continued to be tacitly tolerated.

Finally, in the late 1970s, most states repealed sterilization authorization laws, although allegations of forced hysterectomies and tubal ligatures among women in immigrant detention centers remain. As recently as 2014, California formally banned the sterilization of female inmates without consent.

The sparse law on the Conservatories issue suggests what an outlier the Spears case might be. In 1985, the California Supreme Court denied a petition from the legal guardians of a 29-year-old woman with Down syndrome who wanted her to have tubal ligature.

Usually, a restorer has temporary control over the finances and even medical care of an incapacitated person. Experts pointed out that Ms. Spears’ claim is unconfirmed. But if it’s correct, they said, the most likely reason, even if it’s suspicious, could be that Jamie Spears, her father, wants to protect her finances from the father of a baby, possibly her boyfriend who is allegedly at odds with Mr. Spears is.

When a guardian is concerned that a community is making financially ill-advised decisions, “the cure is not to say they cannot reproduce,” said Sylvia Law, a health scientist at New York University School of Law. “It’s ineffable.”

According to experts in fiduciary and inheritance law, the few cases in which a guardian, usually a parent, ordered a court to order contraception concerned severely disabled children.

“Such a child would not understand that a penis and vagina could make a baby,” said Bridget J. Crawford, an expert on guardianship law at Pace University Law School. “And that’s certainly not the case with Britney Spears.”

Eugenics was a major reason for female sterilization. In the Buck v. Bell in 1927, the Supreme Court upheld the right to sterilize a “moronic” woman who had been admitted to a state mental institution, with Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes notoriously writing: “Three generations of morons are enough. ”

Although the opinion was never formally overturned, Judge William O. Douglas said in a unanimous court on one case, Skinner v. Oklahoma, where the forced sterilization of certain convicted criminals was challenged that the right to procreate was fundamental. “Every experiment that the state conducts is irreparable to it,” he wrote. “He is forever deprived of a fundamental freedom.”

Although Ms. Spears was not sterilized, Ms. Crawford said if she was prevented from having her IUD removed it would be a proxy for sterilization, especially since she testified that she wanted to bear more children.

Melissa Murray, who teaches reproductive rights and constitutional law in NYU law school, pointed to another worrying element in the allegations made by Ms. Spears, who at 39 has been under her father’s 13-year tutelage. Ms. Murray said Ms. Spears, an adult, appeared to have a legally constructed childhood.

“It’s unusual for her father to make the decisions we would expect parents to make in a teenager,” she added.