Keywords

As early as 1977, the Report of the Royal Commission Into Human Relationships in Australia noted: ‘There are instances known to [Family Planning Associations] in which a husband refuses to allow his wife contraceptive advice and, should she obtain this, attempts to throw away the supplies or even to remove the IUD. Where partners are in disagreement about family size the method of contraception may become a source of conflict’ (Evatt et al. 1977, 53–54). In contemporary terms, this would be identified as reproductive coercion and abuse, but this was a phenomenon not yet classified in the 1970s. In an era where the criminalisation of domestic violence and rape in marriage was understandably more urgent, nascent ideas around problematising the control of another person’s reproductive choices were not necessarily prioritised. The violence inherent in acts of reproductive coercion and abuse was briefly noted here by the Royal Commission, most disturbingly in the attempted removal of intrauterine devices by husbands, but it was not yet viewed as an exigent social problem that required intervention. Our present understanding of what constitutes reproductive coercion and abuse—non-consensual interference in another person’s reproductive outcomes—has only been recently understood socially and academically, but it has a long and insidious history.

Using Australia as a case study, this chapter will trace the evolution of consent and reproductive coercion since the “contraceptive revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, where the rapid increase in medical interventions into birth control saw a parallel rise in the use and abuse of these technologies. The introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in the early 1960s was followed by increasingly reliable hormonal and barrier contraception, sterilisation techniques, and medical and surgical abortion procedures, largely due to medical innovation and commercial competition in the ensuing decades (Siedlecky and Wyndham 1990). The relative availability of these methods was beneficial for many who wanted to space out births or to avoid them altogether, but accessibility to new forms of pregnancy prevention also saw increased rates of control over reproducing bodies.

Reproductive coercion and abuse (RCA) sits at a curious intersection between sexual consent and medical consent, as it was and still remains enacted by intimate partners in sexual relationships and by medical authorities in institutional spaces. This chapter examines RCA in familial relationships from both intimate sexual partners and from parents, using evidence from the 1960s through to the present to show a long and consistent pattern of coercion and abuse that we recognise today. These violations of consent rest on assumptions of human rights: ‘the human right to engage in sexual relations, and the human right to reproduce or not’ (Ross and Solinger 2017, 10). Consent to sex does not rest on an assumption of consent to reproduce, and in some cases of RCA consent to sex is not freely given either. Women1 who were most frequently targeted by partners and family were subject to systemic disadvantages and oppressions, including those who were working class, those who were First Nations, those with physical and intellectual disabilities, young women, and teenagers (Steele 2014; Elliott 2017; Tarzia et al. 2022). Because these women were, and are still, subjected to economic and social barriers, they most often suffered coercion and abuse rendered through the removal of sexual and reproductive agency. Yet, there is limited evidence from the voices of these women themselves, as they have been silenced and marginalised in the spaces of consent and reproductive rights until relatively recently.

Reproductive coercion and abuse have historically been facilitated through medical, social, and legal frameworks, but have only recently become a topic of academic investigation (Price et al. 2022; Hickey et al. 2021; Munro 1994; Nelson 2003; Ross and Solinger 2017; Roberts 2017). The literature on RCA has situated this phenomenon through the lens of law, social work, and health, with a dearth of scholarship that examines its history, particularly since the 1960s (Wellington et al. 2021; Tarzia et al. 2022; Carter et al. 2021). Carter et al. (2021, 436) define reproductive coercion and abuse as repetitive behaviours used to dictate another person’s reproductive choices, most notably the forced termination or continuation of pregnancies, or interference with contraception. Other studies have separated RCA into categories of “pregnancy preventing” and “pregnancy promoting” behaviours, but the historical sources lend themselves more readily to distinctions between “contraceptive interference” and “pregnancy control” (Sheeran et al. 2022). Here, contraceptive interference is defined as any tampering with or coercion around pre-conception devices or medicine, including the oral contraceptive pill, intrauterine devices, contraceptive implants, condoms, or other barrier methods. Pregnancy control concerns the forced termination or forced continuation of pregnancy. Scholarship that has been produced on coercion and reproduction has questioned the relationship between them for decades, but the concept of reproductive coercion and abuse as a distinct phenomenon is only recent—people who experienced violence while pregnant and its repercussions for choice were thought to be anomalies in domestic violence studies or studies on abortion (Wood et al. 1971; Hegarty et al. 2000). The link between this violence and controlling reproductive practices is what recent studies are driven to investigate and is apparent in the historical sources. The increase in discourse and practice of “choice” centred on reproductive autonomy in second-wave feminist circles, saw a parallel rise in discussions of coercion where women’s voices were privileged perhaps for the first time in Western nations (Chancer 2019; Hughes 2002). There is no doubt that reproductive coercion as we understand it today has existed for much longer than the 1960s, but the inability to conceptualise the experience, the oppression of particular voices, and legal status of women in society meant that these experiences could not be articulated in ways familiar to us. The language of second-wave feminism meant the articulation of opinions and experiences that violated consent in more nuanced and complex ways.

RCA has been identified in historical international contexts, examining the control and surveillance over reproducing bodies in institutional settings. Sociologist Nicole Rousseau expounded on the inherent problems of the mid- to late-twentieth-century contraceptive revolutions that saw a ‘national emphasis on securing reproductive freedoms for White women while establishing fertility control for “other” populations’ (original emphasis) (2009, 131). This privileging of white reproductive freedoms to the detriment of Black individuals and communities is a product of a nation built on white supremacy, as other noted scholars have identified (Davis 2001; Roberts 2017; Nelson 2003). Scholarship that has examined the American past and reproductive rights has emphasised the role of institutional violence enacted against pregnant people, necessarily centring racial discourse, but has not yet looked historically at the role of family and domestic violence in facilitating RCA. Other settler-colonial states that have witnessed reproductive control at the hands of institutions include Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa, where, again, the historical record has focused primarily on medical authorities and government interventions in the reproductive sphere that have reinforced hierarchies of race and disability (Theobald 2017; Mackenzie et al. 2022; Petchesky and Judd 1998). This is a new area of research for historians, and it can be difficult to trace RCA through the lens of domestic and family violence before the twenty-first century as it appeared alongside other coercive behaviours or was normalised as a product of gendered relations in the home. Recent literature suggests rates of RCA in the United States are not dissimilar to Australia, with a 2018 survey of 27 published studies showing an estimated rate of RCA occurring in 5–13 percent of a sample of 16–29-year-olds when looking at intimate partner violence (Trister Grace and Anderson 2018). Other studies show comparable rates in Aotearoa New Zealand (Burry et al. 2020), Canada (Lévesque and Rousseau 2021), and the UK (Kambashi and Wilson 2022), with RCA occurring over the last decade. Without historical data, it is challenging to trace the development of this phenomenon in other nations to compare with Australian evidence, but comparable social movements, political advancements, and uptake in contraception and abortion technologies across the Anglosphere suggest similar patterns in historical data could be identified with further research.

As in other nations, the Australian literature on historical reproductive coercion focuses on state and institutional practices that enabled coercive reproductive practices to exist. In examining state-enforced reproductive coercion in Australia, Catherine Kevin and Karen Agutter analyse the history of forced fertility control in refugee women from the postwar period compared with the twenty-first century, noting the importance of government control and reproducing an Anglo nation (Kevin and Agutter 2018). This chapter is the first to examine the history of reproductive coercion in domestic and family relationships in Australia, through the fragments available in the historical record. In examining the entanglements of sexual and medical consent inherent within RCA, the right to make informed choices about sex and reproduction is at the centre of understanding where these movements began. While domestic and family violence was identified as a crucial problem within intimate heterosexual relationships during the 1970s feminist movement, much of the focus was on physical and sexual violence (Featherstone 2021). Reproductive coercion was undoubtedly present in these relationships, but was not yet identifiable as a distinct phenomenon under the umbrella of sexual violence, particularly as it often occurred concurrently with sexual assault or rape and was seen as an afterthought.

Considering this, it is impossible to know the exact rates or frequency of RCA in the past. However, what we can use are qualitative methods that demonstrate how reproductive coercion was constructed and understood by victims, practitioners, researchers, activists, and social communities.2 It is through extensive research in the achives and engaging with oral histories that an overarching narrative begins to emerge—we see the snippets and shadows of RCA surfacing when people have a safe and (sometimes) anonymous platform. This chapter first looks at how we can conceptualise RCA through the lens of consent. Crucial to sexual and medical consent is the notion of autonomy and how individuals feel empowered or disempowered to enact reproductive agency in their sexual relationships and in the medical domain. The chapter moves to examining how RCA is understood most identifiably: in heterosexual intimate partner relationships. I analyse qualitative data in the historical record to show the narrative of RCA over time, and how it is used in both contraceptive interference and pregnancy control within intimate relationships. Within intimate partner relationships, there are several themes that emerge when RCA is present, most notably using affection or marriage as manipulation and the correlation of fertility with masculinity—a common feature of sexual violence or coercion. Next, RCA inflicted by parents is examined in the context of domestic and family relationships, particularly towards young women and teenagers. There are intricacies involved in ascertaining coercive tactics from parents, as the age of sexual consent and informed medical consent complicate assertions of autonomy for teenagers and young people. Yet, there are clear instances of RCA enacted by parents that demonstrate relationships of control and fear, also prevalent in intimate partner violence. Ultimately, this research aims to establish a historical basis for RCA to trace patterns and narratives over time.

Reproductive Coercion: Intimate Partner Violence

Where previous chapters in this book have thus far outlined experiences of sexual (non)consent, this chapter builds on those conceptualisations by thinking about intersections of sexual and medical consent through RCA. Although these two concepts are distinct in their positionality, both socially and legally, they overlap considerably when examining ideas of autonomy in sexed bodies. It is this idea of autonomy that is the impetus for understanding coercion and abuse in reproductive circumstances. In examining “proper” and “improper” understandings of autonomy and reproduction through the lens of self-government, Jennifer M. Denbow (2015) argues:

Political theory has historically produced the autonomous individual as male. Correspondingly, this tradition understands women as lacking self-governance. Women thereby seem to require the rule of men to ensure their proper governance. (p. 6)

When considering reproductive coercion, the “rule of men” Denbow refers to can be seen in heterosexual intimate partner relationships, within parental and family groups, and in medical institutions. It is the paternalistic governance of individual bodies that coalesces across different forms of RCA, rendered effective through fear and intimidation.

In the extant scholarship, historical understandings of consent have been defined through the lens of sexual relationships, but not necessarily reproductive ones. The Australian legal landscape in the 1970s did not articulate issues of sexual consent with much nuance: encounters that were not physically violent and perpetrated by strangers apparently became ambiguous in terms of consent (Featherstone 2021). Thus, the suggestion that controlling reproduction could be a violation of consent was too radical to conceptualise within a legal framework at this time. Recent scholarly interest in RCA has seen more concrete definitions emerge distinct from theoretical frameworks of sexual violence. Though current studies have noted ‘RCA shares commonalities with both intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual violence (SV)’, differentiations have been made primarily on the basis of intent (Wellington et al. 2021, 424). As Tarzia and Hegarty (2021) argue, RCA should only constitute behaviours that intend to control pregnancy outcomes or interfere with contraception, and not other forms of violence that have incidental reproductive outcomes. They also argue that RCA enacted by intimate partners or family members is dictated by ‘male entitlement, fear and control’ (2021, 87). These elements of coercion are what I have sought in the historical record to capture this phenomenon, yet they are often perpetrated alongside instances of sexual violence in an attempt to reassert interpersonal power dynamics.

The term RCA has only recently been identified in scholarship when examining intimate partner relationships, influenced by increased understandings of and concern around coercion in the general population (McMahon and Paul McGorrery 2020; Stark 2009). The incidence of RCA in intimate heterosexual relationships is likely the most identifiable occurrence of reproductive coercion, where one partner controls, or attempts to control, the other’s reproductive choices. As part of a broader pattern of coercive control, RCA is demonstrated through a number of methods in family and domestic violence interactions pertaining to the continuation or termination of pregnancy and the use or misuse of contraception. These methods include financial or social pressure to conform, verbal or physical threats to conform, or direct interference in contraceptive methods. Because of the ubiquitous and insidious nature of coercive practices, identifying RCA in the past is complicated, and women often did not realise what they were experiencing was a form of abuse, nor that they had any power to refuse consent. While it is difficult to definitively ascertain the frequency of these sorts of behaviours in the past, the historical record provides glimpses into how RCA was experienced, usually from anonymous sources. On one hand, the anonymity of these people is a necessary safeguard against repercussions of disclosure; on the other hand, the absence of biographical detail poses a challenge to our ability to link the past to the present.

Yet there emerges a distinct narrative over the past sixty years from the archives, oral history sources, and empirical research, one of “pressure” and “force”. Within this body of evidence, there are two recognisable approaches to RCA: contraceptive interference and pregnancy control. Broader social commentary at the time acknowledged that “force” or persuasion might be used in family and domestic violence to determine sexual and reproductive outcomes. For example, one Melbourne woman in a 1980 Australian Women’s Weekly ‘Voice of the Australian Woman’ survey noted ‘I do not agree that [the father] should have the right to force the mother to have the child against her wishes’ (1980, 29). Here, there is no acknowledgement that this is “reproductive coercion” or that this is a particular identifiable problem, but the very mention of force hints at ubiquitous experiences that permeated relationships. Empirical studies conducted in the late-twentieth-century pertaining to birth control usage had incidental findings that intimated pressure or force was used in intimate relationships when considering contraception. In a 1971 study that examined knowledge and use of birth control amongst a sample of 209 working-class women from Melbourne, Wood et al. (1971) found that of the respondents who did not use birth control and did not wish to become pregnant, 9% listed ‘husband objects’ as the reason (p. 692). Two decades later in 1991, another study focusing on trends in contraception and sterilisation noted that ‘successful use of the pill or the IUD requires diligent use only by the female partner. The new methods are thus well-suited to the sexually active but unmarried woman if she fears that her partner’s cooperation might not be forthcoming’ (Santow, 1991, 207). Couched in the conciliatory language of “cooperation”, this nod to coercion indicates the need to use premeditated contraception not necessarily visible to sexual partners to avoid succumbing to situational pressure. Within both of these studies, there is no recognition of a distinct problem with a partner dictating contraceptive choices nor any suggestion of further research into this area, yet the frequency with which this occurred tacitly suggests an extant social problem across at least twenty years.

The competing functions of masculinity, fertility, and fidelity were often cited to justify coercive practices, where men attempted to solidify or regain power within intimate sexual relationships. Government inquiries uncovered quite explicit instances of RCA, but often the proposed recommendations failed to ascertain the extent of the problem and or even confine these behaviours to a singular phenomenon. The 1976 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Poverty noted that behavioural barriers to using contraception amongst working-class people included the impetus to prove masculinity through high fertility. The Commission observed ‘For some men, getting and keeping their wives pregnant is a means of overcoming fears of personal insecurity or of affirming their virility’ (1976, 153). The Royal Commission into Human Relationships (1974–1977) attempted to investigate all aspects of sexual and family life in Australia, including attitudes to abortion, contraception, and pregnancy (Arrow 2014). In the final report, the commissioners reviewed ‘the male role in contraception’, and found the husband’s ‘objection to his wife’s use of contraception is another problem’ (Evatt et al. 1977, 53). Further, they reported that there were cases of the ‘husband who refuses to allow his wife to use oral contraceptives or an IUD because of fears of marital infidelity is not uncommon’ (Evatt et al. 1977, 53). The concern around infidelity was a reoccurring theme, also evidenced in an oral history interview with a woman living in Queensland during the 1980s:

My husband took advice from a priest who said that if he [husband] let me have a tubal ligation, then I would become promiscuous. He would be better off to have a vasectomy, and then it would be alright because he’d know what I was up to because I was still able to get pregnant. A lot of men would perhaps not have sought advice from a priest, and they may have been more than happy for their wife to take care of the problem rather than them have the snip. (Byrnes 2022)

This is a fairly intense example of coercive behaviour, where the husband resorted to extreme measures to ensure pregnancy did not occur (regardless of his wife’s wishes) and to ostensibly remove the possibility of infidelity—assuming the husband believed extramarital affairs would result in pregnancy. While these small snippets of evidence demonstrate the existence of RCA in intimate relationships since the 1970s, it was not until the 2010s that empirical research was conducted on the role of coercion in domestic violence. Prior to this, some studies noted the presence of “emotional abuse” when researching pregnancy and domestic violence, but it did not extend to RCA (Hegarty 2002; Mazza et al. 1996; Webster et al. 1994; Taft and Watson 2004). For example, a 2000 study listed ‘miscarriages’ and ‘unwanted pregnancy’ in the potential clinical indicators of domestic violence in the Medical Journal of Australia, but the research was necessarily limited in its scope and did not recommend further study or engage in significant discussion (Hegarty et al. 2000).

Pregnancy control tactics are more readily identifiable in past sources, as the problem of an actual pregnancy was more urgent than the dilemma of a potential pregnancy as seen in contraceptive interference. Partners who committed pregnancy control violence demonstrated methods of financial abuse, emotional abuse, and sometimes sexual abuse to manipulate and explicitly coerce their victims. Instances involving sexual violence—recognisable to us now with present understandings of consent—were not uncommon, and highlighted established power dynamics within intimate relationships, where the exertion of power in assault was transferred to control over pregnant bodies. One young woman who was sexually assaulted by her boyfriend experienced this quite explicitly:

My boyfriend and I went to a party and I drank a lot of beer and got drunk. My boyfriend took me back to my flat and put me back down on the bed and that’s all I remember. The next day I went to my doctor. He examined me and said that I was pregnant. My boyfriend came around and said that he’d got me pregnant because he loved me. Then, he proposed. Shall I say yes or no? (Dolly 1971, 69)

This reader experience was anonymously submitted in 1971 to an advice column in the popular Australian teenage magazine Dolly (1970–2016) that covered wide-ranging issues in their articles on dating, sexual health, career advice, parental relationships, friendships, and fashion (Minton 2019). Here, this reader was more concerned with the idea of marrying her boyfriend than with the assault and coercion she was experiencing, likely lacking a concrete understanding of consent or assault as we might understand it today. Some of these experiences appeared incidentally in the literature, often in articles about the accessibility of abortion. In an article in the feminist magazine Vashti’s Voice arguing for wider availability of abortion, Jenny, a 21-year-old activist, mentioned her boyfriend’s response in passing: ‘To him my pregnancy was proof of his fertility and it was “our” baby. I remember him saying to me “you killed our baby”. He even insisted on raping me the first night after my abortion, which I was told was dangerous’ (Vashti’s Voice, 1973, 4). Jenny’s use of language shows the complicated ways in which bodily autonomy was constructed, with her almost detached tone around rape and coercion. When faced with the reality of pregnancy, responses from male partners appear much more dramatic and urgent than contraceptive interference—there is an obvious impetus for these partners to control pregnancy decisions in quite serious and forceful ways.

Other methods of RCA included using affection or the insistence of marriage to manipulate pregnancy outcomes. Another young woman articulated her own experience with her casual partner in 1974, noting:

He insisted on marriage. He kept making these speeches about how I wasn’t going to get rid of his child, it was downright murder and I had no right to do it without his permission. … I think right up till the operation [abortion], John hoped I might change my mind. He cooled it a lot, was nicer to me than ever before. Always bringing me flowers, doing little things for me that he’d never done before—like cooking dinner, washing up. But on the night of the abortion he didn’t come to see me and I didn’t see him for two days. He’d gone to Sydney to stay with his last girlfriend. (Dolly 1974, 51)

This is an experience of reproductive coercion that is perhaps more familiar in contemporaneous terms. John insisted on making choices on behalf of his partner, first through marriage and then through the refusal of abortion. He used coercive tactics to change her mind including employing evocative language of “murder” and explicitly arguing that she needed his permission to undergo a termination. When the woman remained unconvinced, John changed strategies to manipulate her with ostensibly placid domesticity, before finally ignoring her after the abortion to signal his disapproval. This is an explicit example of what Carter et al. (2021) define as pressuring a person to continue a pregnancy through emotional manipulation (p. 436). While this illustrates a more nuanced approach to RCA, especially for the time, it is important to consider that marriage as a solution to pregnancy was also proposed in this period due to social pressures to avoid the (decreasing) stigma of children out of wedlock (Bongiorno 2012, 237).

Where the aforementioned cases of pregnancy control show coercion in order to continue a pregnancy, there are cases in the historical record that reveal RCA patterns to secure terminations. In casual relationships, most instances of abortion pressure manifested through funding the termination despite the pregnant person’s desire to remain pregnant. Funding for abortion at private clinics in Australia has been partially subsidised by Medicare (the national healthcare insurance provider) since 1975, though access differed significantly between states after legalisation slowly began in 1970 (Baird 2015, 2017). Funding was similar in the United States with Medicaid partially subsidising terminations until the Hyde Amendment was introduced in 1980 which prohibited federal funding for abortion except in extreme circumstances; whereas, in the UK, most terminations were at least partially funded by the National Health Service since the introduction of the Abortion Act 1967 (Adashi and Occhiogrosso Abelman 2017; Cooper 2023). Because insurance did not fully fund terminations in Australia, abortion often remained financially inaccessible for many and was perceived as the most acute barrier to this healthcare. Therefore, the proposal to pay for this service was often used when attempting to coerce pregnant people into undergoing a termination. One young woman noted, ‘he’s offered to marry me or to give me money for an abortion. I don’t want to marry him, and I definitely don’t want to have an abortion. I just want to go ahead and have the baby, and raise it’ (Dolly 1971, 15). This is a less extreme version of coercion stemming from a casual relationship, where the continuation of pregnancy likely resulted in the male partner leaving the relationship instead.

In longer-term relationships or marriages, the threat of divorce or financial insecurity was most often used to control reproductive outcomes. In an oral history interview conducted with a pregnancy help-line counsellor who lived in Townsville during the 1980s, she noted that this form of coercion was not uncommon. The interviewee said in cases of married couples, the husband would say, ‘get rid of it, I don’t want another kid’ (Byrnes 2022). When asked to elaborate, she recalled one case where:

The husband insisted on an abortion and said he wouldn’t stay with her if she didn’t have it because he wasn’t going to support a fourth child. They had three children already and the car could only carry three children, and they had a house with three bedrooms for the children. Their lives were already set, there was no room for a fourth child. (Byrnes 2022)

The withdrawal of financial support in long-term relationships conforms to current understandings of how RCA operates within a pattern of coercive control, depriving vulnerable people of their only source of income (Douglas and Kerr 2018). In some cases, money was given as an incentive to undergo a termination. Rosemary shared her story publicly, saying that when she got pregnant at 21 with Darren and decided to keep him, ‘Darren’s father handed me the money for the abortion. I threw it back and haven’t seen him since’ (The Australian Women’s Weekly 1972, 3). Financial insecurity contributed to limited options for pregnant people attempting to assert their reproductive agency and enabled coercive practices to be more easily enacted.

Alongside financial insecurity, there were other barriers to reproductive choice for communities who had limited access to sexual health services. In regional and remote towns, often with predominantly Aboriginal populations, doctors offered infrequent scheduled visits on monthly or quarterly rotations through an aeromedical service like the Royal Flying Doctor Service (1998). There were attempts from these sexual and reproductive health services to position Aboriginal men as resistant to contraception despite their partners’ wishes, but this needs to be carefully analysed within a broader narrative of coercive state control around non-white reproduction in a settler-colonial society. Obstetrician and gynaecologist, Dr. Robert Ellwood, who was Chairman of and worked within the Family Planning Association of Queensland’s Cairns branch, was motivated ‘to reach disadvantaged groups and by the nature of Far North Queensland, a vast region which spread west to the Gulf of Carpentaria, south as far as Ingham and north to the Torres Strait Islands… It also served a disproportionately high Indigenous population which was scattered throughout the region’ (Bannah 2001, 128). In Ellwood’s (1974) Chairman’s report, he stated that the Royal Flying Doctor Service (that often administered birth control to remote communities in the FNQ region) noted that in Aboriginal communities ‘the male resists sterilisation of their females. One or two vasectomies have been carried out… At present about 150–200 tubal ligations are done annually at the hospital’ (Ellwood 1974). Despite this notion of resistance from Aboriginal men, a significant number of tubal ligations were still performed on Aboriginal women, suggesting the relationship between Aboriginal men and women and contraceptive practices was much more complex than Family Planning or the Royal Flying Doctor Service anticipated. In a 1979 letter from Ellwood to Barton Clarke (FPAQ Council Chairman), Ellwood outlined recent findings from Aboriginal communities, attended to by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the Aboriginal Health Program, and the Yarrabah Community Clinic. Ellwood noted:

  1. 1.

    There is apparently no communication on family planning matters between the female and (sic) males in the Aboriginal populations; the female (sic) consider it to be a purely female consideration while the males consider that basic wealth in life and old age is embodied in large families.

  2. 2.

    It follows therefore that the male will remove intrauterine devices and prevent the female from taking oral contraceptives unless she can do so covertly (Ellwood, 1979).

In either example, there was no elaboration on how Aboriginal men “resisted” sterilisation or contraceptive choices of Aboriginal women, perhaps demonstrating a justified wariness of state-sanctioned reproductive interference. There is also an absence of any explicit reference to informed consent when administering these contraceptive or sterilisation methods to Aboriginal women. Fertility control services in Far North Queensland have previously been accused of coercive practices interfering with Aboriginal people’s reproduction; thus, it is not impossible that these instances of ‘coercion’ Ellwood lack understanding of the historical and cultural nuances involved in reproductive choices for First Nations communities, and were not, in fact, coercion as we might understand it today (Tatz 2001; Moreton-Robinson 2000).

Reproductive Coercion: Parental Intervention

One of the most challenging distinctions to make when researching RCA in familial settings is the issue of parental control and informed medical consent. The age of sexual consent in Australia differed by state but sat between 16 and 18 from the 1970s, yet the age of informed medical consent was 18. In an examination of child consent laws in Australia, John Devereux noted that the age of consent regarding sexual offences ‘has been interpreted by some to mean that a child is incapable of consenting to anything’, but that ultimately there is ambiguity in the law in regard to medical consent and children’s capacity to understand (Devereux 1991, 286). Laws in Australia were influenced by “Gillick competence”, which refers to a 1985 decision handed down in England and Wales which determined that a parent’s right to moderate their child’s medical treatment diminishes as the child’s maturity evolves enough to consent (Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech AHA 1985). The test case for Gillick competence centred on a GP’s right to administer contraception to children under the age of 16, and this evaluation of capacity has been taken up in Australian common law (Department of Health & Community Services v JWB & SWB 1992). As such, it is difficult to determine in historical sources whether a teenager has matured enough to consent and thus would be considered Gillick competent, and even more difficult to establish this pre-1985 before this was adopted in Australia.

Despite these methodological challenges, there is trace evidence of discourse around teenagers’ ability to consent to sex weighed up against their ability to consent to reproductive choices in historical sources. Commissioners who led the Royal Commission into Human Relationships grappled with this socio-legal problem in a case of a girl younger than 16 who was pregnant:

“The girl concerned has already had sexual intercourse,” the commission deliberated. “The issue is whether she should have the child or have an abortion. The younger the age, the less ready she is to take on the responsibilities of motherhood.” The commission felt that counselling was essential and that girls under 16 should be encouraged to involve their parents. But, “provided she is capable of understanding and making a responsible decision and has had access to proper and thorough counselling, (our view is that) it is for the girl to decide whether to have the abortion or give birth to the child”. (The Australian Women’s Weekly 1977, 5)

Here, it is the capability of understanding the repercussions of reproductive outcomes that is the determining factor in this girl’s access to choice. The Commissioners also noted that the teen had already engaged in sex, suggesting a distinction between the responsibility required to have sex and responsibility required to become a parent. However, there is limited discernment between capacity to consent to sex and capacity to consent to termination, suggesting engagement with sexual intercourse and undergoing abortion require the same level of maturity and capacity to understand.

In the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1979, Paula Rhoden wrote in to ask, ‘My daughter’s abortion—did I make the right decision?’ about her 15-year-old child who became pregnant (p. 133). Rhoden immediately organised an abortion for her daughter, though it was unclear if the daughter consented to this procedure. In a follow-up article ‘Abortion: Did a Mother Make the Right Decision?’ parents themselves commented on Rhoden’s case, remarking on the issues around decision-making capacity in teenagers. An anonymous parent noted, ‘your daughter is still a child only preparing for childbearing, not ready to do it now’ (The Australian Women’s Weekly 1979, 125). These interventions in young people’s reproductive lives are not straightforward as they sit at the nexus of sexual and medical consent. If young people can consent to sex from a particular age, does that consent encompass responsibility for the outcomes of intercourse? This is a question we are still wrestling with today, and ascertaining its implications upon RCA from parents.

When researching younger peoples’ experiences with sex, consent, and reproduction, many of their choices are restricted by parents’ ideological attitudes or in some cases by direct force. As noted, there were ambiguities in the law that made it difficult to ascertain whether parental consent was required in some of these cases, or whether coercion was involved. In all of the RCA cases we have seen involving parental control, abortion or adoption are proposed universally. Some young people felt pressure from their parents to not raise a child for financial or age reasons, with one young woman noting in 1979: ‘My parents wanted me to have [an abortion] but I refused and ran away to live with the baby’s father. After three months he kicked me out and I went back to my family. I had nothing and my parents, who are in their 50s, didn’t need a new baby to look after, so I made a hard decision. I agreed on adoption’ (The Australian Women’s Weekly 1979, 125). This decision was based on the requests of the woman’s parents, where the child was not in their lives at all. By the time this young woman went to live with her parents again, she was likely over the legal gestation limit to obtain an abortion and turned to adoption as the solution. This is a much more ambiguous situation of financial and social pressure, where social security options were unavailable for financial support and the need for housing was urgent. In an explicit case of parental interference, a now ‘married woman in NSW’ reflected on her parents’ involvement in coercion and abuse: ‘At the age of 15, I was forced by my parents to undergo dangerous “surgery” and the results were both painful and traumatic. After marriage, I discovered that I had been rendered sterile by this illegal termination… At 15 I was naïve and frightened enough to comply with my parents’ decision’ (The Australian Women’s Weekly 1980, 16). It is unclear whether the termination was obtained legally and unavoidable medical complications rendered the patient sterile, or whether the termination was illegal and performed under unsafe conditions, where sterility was a side effect of the botched abortion. In either circumstance, her reproductive choices were removed and the narrative of force and coercion is repeated.

Another case of repeated parental intervention came from a 1978 advice column in the Australian Women’s Weekly, where a parent wrote in to ask about their 15-year-old daughter who was pregnant for the second time (p. 35).The parent noted that they assisted in procuring an abortion for the first pregnancy and insisted on the oral contraceptive pill afterwards, but the daughter refused to have an abortion for the second pregnancy and wanted to raise the baby. The parent called this decision ‘lunacy’ and asked how they could convince their daughter otherwise. There is an interesting intersection here between the capability to consent to sex and capability to make reproductive choices, where the parents are not necessarily condemning sex itself (and ensure the child is having safer sex on the pill) but are condemning the procreative outcomes of heterosexual intercourse. In extreme cases, parents of the young man involved would coerce the pregnant young woman into undergoing an abortion, reinforcing gendered expectations around the responsibility of pregnancy, where young men refused to be involved—a narrative that still permeates understandings of reproductive outcomes. At an early point in the narrative of RCA, in 1965 one 16-year-old became pregnant to her 19-year-old boyfriend and upon telling him, ‘he said it would never work out, that we didn’t have enough money, and that he didn’t want the baby. His parents backed him up completely. His father even waylaid me on the station one night and yelled at me, and tried to bully me into having an abortion’ (The Australian Women’s Weekly 1965, 4). This experience is particularly harrowing even beyond coercion, as abortion was not yet decriminalised in any state nor was safe abortion accessible throughout Australia at this time.

In trying to establish experiences of RCA in the past, using the lens of domestic and family violence is a useful framework for analysis to determine the more insidious aspects of this abuse, but it can be difficult to separate historical social expectations from definitive instances of coercion. These fragments from the archival record can be carefully constructed to reveal moments of identifiable RCA within the domestic and family sphere. Yet, there are significantly more cases of social or financial pressure determining pregnancy outcomes that are representative of the era and are too ambiguous to conclusively classify as reproductive coercion with our modern understanding of the phenomena. As one commentator noted of the expectations of this time:

Most people, when they found out they were pregnant and unmarried, they were deserted. The boyfriend didn’t want to know, the parents were so ashamed of you they didn’t want to know, it would kill your grandmother, what would the neighbours say, we’ll never be able to go to church again, we’ll never be able to hold our heads up in society if you go ahead with this. So, there was enormous pressure put on women to have an abortion. (Byrnes 2022)

While the discourse of pressure and force is still evident here, to define these circumstances as reproductive coercion is ambitious when all decisions around contraception and pregnancy outcomes were a product of different social, familial, and financial concerns. Tracing RCA historically, particularly within domestic and family violence, remains a challenge but is necessary in understanding the way medical technology coupled with individual rights produces opportunities for agency and opportunities for abuse.

Conclusion

In examining RCA enacted by intimate partners and parents, this chapter has identified the existence of coercive practices that undermine notions of consent in the recent past. Analysing RCA to conceptualise understandings of consent and the body is a useful tool to demonstrate the complex negotiations that women entered in attempting to assert sexual and reproductive autonomy. While increased availability of contraception and abortion methods were empowering for some, it facilitated RCA in much more devious and implicit ways. At times, intimate partners used physical or sexual violence, or the threat of, to control reproductive outcomes and reinforce a power dynamic within relationship in which the removal of consent was at its very core. At other times, much more nuanced and subtle manipulations were used, including the proposal of marriage or declarations of love. The association between fertility and masculinity was a driving factor in ‘keeping her constantly pregnant’ or in refusing access to contraception or abortion. Parental involvement in young peoples’ reproductive decisions sits at a much messier junction between the age of sexual consent and the age of informed medical consent. Parents universally agitated for their pregnant children to undergo a termination or to submit to adoption services, regardless of their children’s desires or ability to consent to these procedures.

Documenting a history of RCA is a methodological challenge, given the scarcity of sources and the problems of defining coercion. Yet, as this chapter has shown, there is definitive evidence of RCA in the past that emerged through qualitative sources to demonstrate an overarching narrative of fear, and pressure. The evidence reveals that little has changed discursively and in practice over the past sixty years, with the “rule of men” maintaining a stronghold over women’s ability to consent. Though it is important to distinguish between sexual coercion and RCA, the denial of autonomy and exertion of interpersonal power is a commonality shared by both that is inflicted upon women through ‘male entitlement, fear and control’ (Tarzia and Hegarty 2021, 87). Tracing this history of RCA in Australia’s recent past highlights the insidious nature of coercive control tactics, and how social and political norms can uphold inequality despite marked advancements in seemingly similar areas.

Notes

  1. 1.

    While this research uses the term “women” to denote reproducing bodies, this is not to erase the experiences of trans or non-binary people who did not identify as women when considering reproductive coercion and abuse in the past. The historical sources conform to a binary gender model, particularly when thinking about medical issues or the capacity to reproduce. Where possible, we have avoided this bioessentialist language.

  2. 2.

    The research in this chapter comes from archival sources, oral history interviews, and empirical studies to show the development of RCA over time using an historical approach. The primary sources used in this chapter come from a thorough and systematic survey of published literature including: feminist journals and women’s magazines (e.g., Vashti’s Voice and The Australian Women’s Weekly), medical journals (e.g., Medical Journal of Australia and The Australian & New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology), government reports (e.g., Report of the Royal Commission Into Human Relationships and the Report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse), Hansard reports for all states and the commonwealth, newspaper sources (e.g., Sydney Morning Herald and Canberra Times). I have also conducted extensive archival research, looking into the Family Planning Association records, the Royal Flying Doctor Service records, Children by Choice records, Women Who Want to be Women records, abortion inquests from Queensland, NSW, and Victoria, Winlaton Youth Training Centre records, Department of Health records, Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives, and Victorian Women’s Refuge Group records, amongst others.

    Interwoven amongst the written records are oral history interviews conducted with activists and community members, who remember distinct instances of RCA in their own lived experiences. Interviews in the current research were approved under the Human Research Ethics conditions in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines, and these 7 semi-structured interviews were conducted with a doctor, a teacher, a Family Planning Association of Queensland employee, a nurse, activists, and a pregnancy counsellor. The participants in this research lived across regional and rural areas in Queensland, as well as residing in Brisbane and other major cities, to ensure a more representative sample. Participants’ experiences with accessing or providing contraception and education services were discussed to form a meaningful aspect of the qualitative research in this research.