What You Need To Know About Reproductive Coercion

By Lilly Dancyger

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In the mid-2000s, adolescent medicine specialist Elizabeth Miller at the University of California, Davis, noticed a troubling pattern. Several of her young female patients mentioned that their male partners were interfering with their use of birth control. “One patient described the condom breaking six times during sex,” recalls Dr. Heather McCauley, a colleague of Miller’s who was involved in the research. “And while she thought that was strange, she didn’t identify as experiencing abuse.” Miller decided to look further into the phenomenon. She eventually recognized it as a form of intimate partner abuse, and dubbed it reproductive coercion.

Miller published a study in 2010 called “Reproductive coercion and partner violence: implications for clinical assessment of unintended pregnancy,” the first mention of this phenomenon in the scientific literature. She and her co-author Jay G. Silverman discovered that reproductive coercion disproportionately affects younger women, is closely linked with intimate partner violence, and has negative implications for women’s reproductive and psychological health.

As with other forms of abuse, reproductive coercion is a way of asserting control over a partner. In these cases, that control manifests in the form of a male partner either directly interfering…