ACOG Wants Doctors to Screen for “Reproductive Coercion”

 

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D

 When a husband hides a wife’s birth control pills or a boyfriend takes off a condom in the middle of sex in hopes of getting an unwilling girlfriend pregnant, that’s a form of abuse called “reproductive coercion.” While researchers don’t know exactly how common such coercion is, it’s common enough — especially among women who are abused by their partners in other ways — that health care providers should screen women for signs at regular check-ups and pregnancy visits, says the nation’s leading group of obstetricians and gynecologists.

“We want to make sure that health care providers are aware that this is something that does go on and that it’s a form of abuse,” said Veronica Gillispie, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Ochsner Health System, New Orleans, and a member of the committee that wrote the opinion for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the February issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Well, reproductive coercion is a two-way street. As Bioedge notes, NPR has reported that about twice as many women engage in RC (8.7%) as men (4.8%).
Reproductive coercion is wrong no matter who does it, of course. But why do I think this is part of a larger overarching ideological agenda to intrude the technocracy into every area of American life–and most particularly, those of women. I mean, for all the talk about how powerful women now are, the technocracy clearly views many as helpless.

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 Article from the Washington Post

LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture.