MEN CAN IMPOSE WILL IN ABORTIONS
A woman’s reproductive decisions are hers. But husbands, boyfriends can sometimes resort to violence.
Forced abortion is not isolated to China and a few other countries where reproduction and state violence go hand in hand. It is widespread in America, too.
Legally, a woman’s reproductive decisions are hers alone. But outside the courtroom, men — boyfriends and husbands — hold a lot of influence over those decisions. And that influence often manifests itself violently. Consider cases from this year:
In Florida, John Andrew Welden was charged with first-degree murder and product tampering when his girlfriend says he tricked her into taking Cytotec, a drug that could result in an abortion, after she refused to end her pregnancy. His ex-girlfriend, Remee Lee, 26, also has filed a lawsuit against him.
In New York, Christian Ferdinand allegedly killed and set fire to a 14-year-old girl whom he believed he had impregnated. A medical examiner later determined that the young victim wasn’t even pregnant.
In Connecticut, prosecutors say Carlton Bryan hired a hit man to kill his 21-year-old girlfriend because she refused to abort their unborn baby.
Then there’s Ariel Castro, a Cleveland man who allegedly kept three girls captive for more than a decade until their escape in May. Castro is accused of beating and starving one captive until she miscarried, five times. The revelations of forced abortions have prompted prosecutors to consider seeking the death penalty against Castro.
STUDIES REFLECT COERCION
Beyond these recent cases, there is evidence that many men resort to intimidation and violence to coerce women they’ve impregnated into aborting.
A 2012 study by the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit research group, found that 7% of women who had abortions experienced sexual or physical abuse by the child’s father in the year before her abortion. This compares with about 1% of women who suffer similar abuse in the general population. Seven percent might not sound like much. But a small percentage of a huge number is still a large number. That 7% represents 84,000 aborting women a year.
The study concluded, “Women with abusive partners are substantially over-represented among abortion patients.”
A 2010 Guttmacher study found that more men than is commonly acknowledged exert “reproductive control” over their girlfriends and wives. Among women with abusive partners, more than 70% reported that their partners used verbal threats, physical aggression or birth control sabotage to force her to become pregnant, to abort or, in a surprising number of cases, both.
In a 2005 Guttmacher report examining the reasons why women abort, 14% said their “husband or partner wants me to have an abor- tion,” and 14% said they received insufficient “support from husband or partner.” Two percent said their “husband or partner is abusive to me or my children.”
DON’T BLAME CONSERVATIVES
Political conservatives are routinely accused of waging a “war on women.” But to find the real war on women, many women need look no further than their own bedrooms.
Violence against pregnant women has become so prevalent that legislators have enacted laws to try to prevent it. In 2004, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which made it a separate crime to kill or injure an unborn child during the commission of any of more than 60 federal crimes, became law. Thirty-eight states have similar statutes on the books, and 23 states apply them to first-trimester babies.
Several states have passed laws requiring abortionists to post signs in their facilities informing women that it is against the law for anyone to force them into having an abortion. A few require counselors to screen women to find out whether they’ve been coerced into aborting.
Of course, most men do not react violently to news of an unexpected pregnancy. And, sometimes, the violence takes a different form.
Last year, a man in the United Kingdom killed himself after discovering that his girlfriend was planning to abort their child.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked that some men react violently to news of an unwanted pregnancy. After all, many probably ask themselves: If my girlfriend can have sex and then decide whether or not she wants to be a parent, why can’t I?
It is natural to wonder why some men would react violently to news of a partner’s pregnancy. But in an age in which the destruction of innocent human life has been transformed into a constitutional right, the explanation is simple, and captured in three words by Martin Luther King: “Violence begets violence.”