We need to talk about reproductive coercion.

[HelenaDove]

This thread has been prompted by a poster who has mentioned that she has sadly experienced this on another board.

I googled "reproductive coercion" and one of the top searches that came up was "how to tamper with birth control pills" That means it must be being searched for on a very regular basis.

I find this very very alarming.

Ive also seen a childfree by choice journalist being trolled on twitter on a regular basis.

Are men like this really so threatened by the fact that women may like to have more freedom and not choose to be a parent until they are ready or choose not to be a parent at all.

I have no doubt in my mind that the kind of man who would troll someone for making this choice is either at best someone who would be dismissive of and/or minimize reproductive coercion and/or at worst someone who may even consider doing it themselves.

Im horrified that the phrase i mentioned above is being Googled so often.

I have a link on the relationship between domestic violence and unintended pregnancy:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15590382

We can safely assume that the higher number of unwanted pregnancies in women whose male partners are violent, is due to reproductive coercion.

Since reproductive coercion is also done by men who are not (yet) otherwise abusive, the actual numbers are likely much higher.

Pearlylum I've never seen a single thread on this forum where a woman has been advised to stop the pill and get pregnant if she wants a child when her partner doesn't. I can believe that there must be the occasional individual idiot poster who says that, but it's vanishingly rare if so. To be fair, in real life when I wanted a kid I was told 'just get pregnant' by many people, male and female. (I didn't.)

If I wanted to force a partner into pregnancy I wouldn't google 'reproductive coercion' I would google 'how many holes in a condom to get pregnant.'

Agree that this is the most fundamental attack on women's autonomy.

Any poster who suggests just going off the pill secretly is roundly jumped on by many posters straight after.

A partner pulled out my IUD. I think he'd actually planned it.

When I write it down I feel a bit , but at the time I was more shocked than anything.

Bloody hell Iwas

Oh skirt, that's horrible.