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Reproductive coercion: What happens when your partner overrules your pregnancy choice?
By The Washington Post
By Eva Glicksman
Sometimes he could be abusive, but the man she lived with had always honoured her wish to use birth control. One night, though, he didn t.
The Los Angeles woman, then 22, tried to get Plan B, the morning-after pill, but was refused at the clinic because she owed money to the state medical system. And she was pregnant.
Considering abortion made her feel guilty. Her boyfriend made it worse: What kind of human being are you? he taunted.
Elizabeth Miller, director of adolescent and young adult medicine at the UPMC Children s Hospital of Pittsburgh, was the first to identify and study this form of domestic abuse she called reproductive coercion - when a man or a woman tries to overrule a partner s choice about a pregnancy.
Reproductive coercion is a distinctive type of domestic abuse that includes birth control sabotage, pregnancy coercion and controlling pregnancy outcome, experts say.