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Issue 1 2016.Pub 90 Reproductive coercion and the Australian state: A new chapter? Patricia Hayes Victoria University While the concept of reproductive coercion is most commonly used in understanding tactics employed by some male perpetrators of violence against women, it is also used to identify policy and legislative environments of nation states that may be supportive of reducing women’s levels of autonomy and self-determination in relation to their reproductive health and family planning decisions. The offshore detention immigration policies of successive Australian governments have created several cases over the last decade where community workers in Australia have had to identify and understand how best to work with the power relations inherent in counselling work with women as asylum seekers who are making decisions about their pregnancies in the context of state-based reproductive coercion. The answer to working with this complex ethical issue lies beyond the scope of mere interpersonal and intra-psychic counselling interventions. stark. The capacity of women in offshore detention to provide ‘free and full consent’ to an ‘autonomous choice’ of either continuing their pregnancy or having an abortion is strongly compromised by their involuntary detention. It is worth remembering that this detention is mandatory and women are detained without proof of a crime being committed, the luxury of a trial or recourse to a timely appeal process, courtesy of the immigration policies of the Australian Government. The power relations inherent within such a relationship prompt the question: Does the phenomenon Illustration: Australian Financial Review, of women making decisions about their September 2015. Copyright David Rowe/ pregnancies in this environment herald a Fairfax Syndication, Reproduced with new chapter in a history of reproductive permission. coercion in Australia? As social workers, psychologists, counsellors and health Counsellors working in the field of professionals, it also implores us to ask unplanned pregnancy and abortion in questions about how we make sense of our Australia often bear witness to women role in this context. making choices for abortion and/or From interpersonal to state violence: A continuing a pregnancy as choices that can continuum occur along a continuum of consent to The term reproductive coercion has coercion. Issues such as domestic violence, traditionally been used to describe a range of homelessness, mental health and poverty all coercive tactics used by intimate partners constitute impediments to a free choice for and others to control a woman’s women who of necessity must sort through reproductive decisions: a decision to either and consider these imperfect contexts in order bear children or to terminate a pregnancy. A to reach their decision. However, for women recent study by the University of Queensland who are asylum seekers and forced into Pro Bono Centre (Cheung et al., 2014) offshore detention facilities by the Australian defined reproductive coercion in domestic Government, the point of difference between violence as occurring where: their context of ‘choice’ and ‘consent’, compared to mainland Australian residents, is The Australian Community Psychologist Volume 28 No 1 August 2016 © The Australian Psychological Society Ltd Reproductive Coercion 91 The male partner convince[es] the navigate in relation to decisions about their woman that he will leave her if she pregnancies when confronted by individual does not become pregnant; acts of coercion and threat from intimate The male partner engag[es] in birth partners and family members. However, control sabotage (such as destroying Australia as a nation also has a long history birth control pills, pulling out vaginal of dalliances with reproductive coercion, rings etc.); especially when it comes to women on the The male partner exercis[es] financial margins of Australian society. The control, so as to limit access to birth intersections of ethnicity, class, (dis)ability control; and gender have proven fertile sites for the The male partner insist[s] on State to try to control particular women’s unprotected sex or rape. (p.2) reproductive choices. Central to the idea of reproductive Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander coercion is the deprivation of the conditions Women that constitute autonomy in women’s Earlier colonial attempts to ‘breed out’ reproductive decision making. The leading Aboriginality included notorious US sexual and reproductive health rights miscegenation projects such as those think tank, The Guttmacher Institute, thus promoted by A.O. Neville in Western defines the idea of reproductive coercion as Australia (Bashford & Levine, 2010). Up ‘the deprivation of voluntarism and informed until the mid-1970s Aboriginal and Torres consent in relation to family planning’ (Barot, Strait Islander women felt the brutal impact 2012a, np). and legacy of forced sterilisation, and However, reproductive coercion exists historians argue that in many ways, the on a continuum. It is perpetrated at one end making and remaking of the Australian by an individual or family then continues nation was founded upon projects of through to governments and the state. A reproductive control in relation to race Guttmacher policy analysis (Barot, 2012b) (Bulbeck, 1998; Grimshaw et al., 1996). defined reproductive coercion as including Women with Disabilities policies, legislations and incentives used by Women with disabilities have also governments to either prevent childbearing or encountered and continue to encounter compel it. reproductive coercion. The 2013 Senate This principle applies across inquiry into the sterilisation of women and national borders and at all levels girls with disabilities in Australia of government, whether it's local documented a litany of reproductive Chinese officials forcing women coercion (manipulation, intimidation) and to terminate a wanted pregnancy reproductive force (involuntary sterilisation or U.S. state legislatures passing procedures without any consent) (PWDA, increasingly coercive abortion 2013). The inquiry received submissions restrictions to keep women from that detailed histories of women and girls ending an unwanted one. (Barot, with disabilities in foster care and other 2012a, p.1) community residential settings who were Chapters of reproductive coercion in subject to both coercion and force in relation Australia: a potted history to contraception and sterilization Women’s rights to reproductive (Frohmader, 2012). autonomy have always existed along a State-based ‘Care’ Institutions continuum of coercion―often in relation to Recent evidence given by former their socio-economic circumstances, available Victorian wards of state at the Royal social supports and exposure to violence, as Commission into Institutional Responses to well as policy and legislative contexts. As a Child Sexual Abuse has uncovered examples counsellor I’ve often assisted women to of coercion by state authorities, including the examine what levels of coercion they have to forced administration of gynaecological The Australian Community Psychologist Volume 28 No 1 August 2016 © The Australian Psychological Society Ltd Reproductive Coercion 92 examinations as well as Depo Provera no greater if they have a single contraceptive injections (Hall, 2015). elective first-trimester abortion Intimate partner violence and reproductive than if they deliver that coercion pregnancy. (APA, 2008, p.90) For social workers and others working Robust research into protective and in the field of counselling in community risk factors for abortion is gradually services in Australia, and more specifically, emerging, and Australian researchers Taft women’s services, the phenomenon of and Watson (2008) have begun to document violence against women is not a new one. the risks of co-occurring factors such as Intimate partner violence and family violence intimate partner violence and its negative has been a perennial and powerful force: the effects on women experiencing unplanned spectre of male violence, coercion and abuse, pregnancies in this context. Most notably, in played out at the interpersonal and social relation to reproductive coercion, their level, has been raised and heard in research found that there is a link between counselling rooms. Its dramatic impacts on women who have experienced key aspects of women’s physical, emotional and social intimate partner violence - such as forced or wellbeing are well documented (VicHealth, pressured sex and forced or pressured 2004; World Health Organisation, 2013). abortion - and depression. Research in this Similarly, for social workers area is often highly contested due to the counselling women in relation to unplanned influence of anti-choice forces seeking to pregnancy and abortion, the phenomenon of demonstrate abortion as a universal violence against women in the context of their ‘negative’ event no matter whether pregnancy decision is also not a new one. As reproductive coercion is present or not. discussed previously, reproductive coercion - Research into the area of coercion or constituted by interpersonal threats or acts of force as a risk factor for post-termination violence in relation to women and their psychological distress is a burgeoning area pregnancies (becoming a parent or ending a (Chibber et al., 2014). However, anti-choice pregnancy) - is also not a new phenomenon; coalitions seek to argue that distress is however it is one that is only beginning to be caused only by forced abortion, rather than
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