Tag: contraception

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Women of #nzpol Twitter: on forced contraception for beneficiaries

A few months ago I suggested that I should do a woman-only Twitter round-up on topical issues, in the interests of amplifying women’s voices in the political debate and also because:

black widow misandry

So here’s some top tweets on Anne Tolley’s suggestion of coercing encouraging beneficiaries to get sterilised.

https://twitter.com/Dovil/status/648225594820292608

If you see any tweets you think I should include in a women-of-#nzpol roundup, drop me a tweet @bootstheory using the hashtag #blatantmisandry.

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Anne Tolley’s next abhorrent idea: forced sterilization of poor people

It’s going to be incredibly difficult not to Godwin the hell out of this one, people.

Appearing on TVOne’s Q+A programme this morning, Social Development minister Anne Tolley would not rule out more actively trying to limit or prevent births to families which have come to the attention of authorities.

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“Well, we’ll wait and see what the panel report. I expect that they’ll be saying, ‘We should get much, much faster contraceptive advice in. We should be offering, you know, tubal ligations, all sorts of things and counselling those families’,” she said.

Tubal ligation is not a form of contraception. Tubal ligation is a form of sterilization.

And sure, anybody who wants to make an informed decision to get a tubal ligation should be able to. I know plenty of childfree people who’d run at the chance, after many years of “you’ll want kids when you’re older” concern-trolling from the medical establishment.

But let’s not confuse Anne Tolley’s suggestion with any kind of progressive reproductive healthcare policy. This is simply National applying further bullying to “undesirable” people not to have children. And there are many words for that, and most of them are rightly associated with, shall we say, certain fascist societies.

Let’s remember how this government generally acts towards people on benefits, and ask ourselves if we really believe the “offer” of sterilization or counselling or long-term contraception is actually being made in an open-minded, compassionate way.

Let’s remember that their plan of offer free long-term contraception – which was an expensive failure – wasn’t just targeted at beneficiaries, but at their teenage daughters – and what kind of message that sends about “those kind of people”.

I support reproductive choice. I support the state making options available to people, on their own terms, to control when they have kids and how many kids they have. It’d be great to see a government which actually cared enough about stopping unwanted pregnancies to extend free doctor’s appointments for sexual health to more young people, or ensuring quicker access to abortion services.

But that’s not what we’re getting. We’re getting another dystopic, daddy-state interference in the lives of people who are already pushed to the absolute limits. We’re applying the power of government to threaten people who have incredibly little with even less if they dare to have a family the powers-that-be don’t approve of.

It’s grotesque. And worse, it’s probably not even sincere. Anne Tolley knows this won’t solve any of the problems she says exist in our social welfare system. But it will get great headlines about cracking down on those filthy bludging breeders-for-a-business. And even people on the left won’t be rushing to call it out for what it is: a repugnant attack on basic human rights.

~

Some people want to see the good in everything and think we should focus on the important stuff – better access to contraception – instead of calling out Tolley’s horrific agenda. Unfortunately, the coverage this morning makes it all pretty clear:

The Minister for Social Development wants to find a way of stopping the most at-risk beneficiaries from having more children.

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Anne Tolley admitted it was a tricky subject, but said something had to be done about the women who have multiple children taken into care.

Emphasis mine; coercive restrictions on poor women’s reproduction all hers.

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(Repost) Informed consent: As simple as asking?

This post originally appeared at On The Left.

The experience of a woman who had an IUCD inserted without her knowledge shows that there’s still a long way to go when it comes to informed consent in New Zealand.

The intrauterine contraceptive device was inserted when the woman went to Epsom Day Unit to have an abortion in 2010. She had not consented to having it and it was only in 2013 that she discovered it, after unsuccessful attempts to get pregnant.

An investigation by the Health and Disability Commissioner found the doctor mistakenly “assumed” the woman wanted the contraceptive device after seeing it on a hospital trolley.

There’s a lot of deep, serious stuff you can get into about informed consent – an issue with a dark history in New Zealand. Sandra Coney’s book recounting the Unfortunate Experiment at National Women’s Hospital in Auckland was one of the first “feminist” books I read, and even though I wasn’t old enough to really understand all the issues (certainly not the science) one thing was really, horribly impressed on me: that patients have the right to know what’s happening to them. And they must be allowed to make their own choices. And cis women (and, I’d learn as my feminism developed, trans women, people of colour, people with disabilities, people in every marginalized group and especially people in more than one) were frequently, automatically, denied that choice.

It raises a lot of questions about the assumptions we make (doctors are demigods, patients aren’t rational, science is unbiased) and the systems and structures we have around medical care, which feed in turn into questions about how our society regards certain people (e.g. husbands having the power to commit their wives to mental institutions). Those are big, meaty ideas which could require a lot of soul-searching and discussion.

But in this case – based on nothing more than reading the Stuff article quoted above – it seems that the woman’s trauma could have been entirely avoided just by a surgeon bothering to ask, “Hey, is this IUCD for you, or another patient?”

Add in the fact that Auckland District Health Board initially refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong with depriving someone of the ability to have children for three years, and this seems to be much less about serious ethical considerations about informed consent, and more about sheer arrogance and lack of concern about people’s wellbeing.

So what do we do to change that? In this case it’s good that the Health and Disability Commissioner has taken action to make it very clear that this kind of thing simply cannot happen. Auckland District Health Board has been “recommended” to do a spot review of patient records to make sure this hasn’t happened multiple times. We need to pay close attention to make sure that they actually change the way they do things to stop it happening again.

(I’ve tried to use gender-neutral language where appropriate in this article. Not all people who become pregnant/get abortions/have IUDs are women, and not all women can get pregnant. But I think the medical establishment, like society, still groups all people who are assumed to have uteri and assumed to be able to get pregnant under the heading of “women”, and the second-class status of that group is a contributing factor to this particular case.)