Thread by @RewireNewsGroup

Britney Spears appeared remotely in Los Angeles court yesterday and revealed just how oppressive her conservatorship is, telling the court she wants to have another baby, but her father is preventing her from removing her IUD.

“I want to be able to get married and have a baby. I was told right now in the conservatorship, I’m not able to get married or have a baby.”

How is this possible? Britney Spears is 39 years old, has had a successful Vegas residency, and continues to perform and tour.

It’s because for the past 13 years, Britney Spears has been under conservatorship. A conservatorship puts a court-mandated guardian in charge of the decision-making for people deemed unable to act in their own best interests.

In Spears’ case, her father has had control over nearly every aspect of her life since her mental crisis in February 2008. And he has paid handsomely for it—to the tune of $16K per month out of her salary.

Meanwhile, Spears is provided $8K per month as an allowance.

Spears’ father maintains nearly full control over her finances and life. He controls how many hours she works per day, what tours she is required to go on, what medication she is required to take, and, incredibly, whether she is permitted to have children.

Following the bombshell that her father is preventing her from having another baby, a lot of people expressed sympathy for Britney Spears.

But few made the connection between her plight and the plight of people with disabilities, both currently and throughout history.

Conservatorships are frequently used when elderly people, for example, are no longer able to care for themselves.

They are also used for anyone with a disability who is deemed unable to care for themselves. The conservator-guardian relationship is often exploitative.

The guardianship system doesn’t just control someone’s finances—it controls intimate details of their lives as evidenced by the stranglehold that Spears’ father has on her life, going so far as to disallow her from removing her IUD.

There’s a word for this: forcible sterilization. And here’s another one: eugenics.

For years, anti-choicers have been waging a war against Planned Parenthood and its founder, Margaret Sanger, on the basis of her eugenicist beliefs.

They disingenuously demand that the organization be defunded due to false claims that Margaret Sanger was a virulent racist who wanted to eradicate Black people from existing by putting pop up abortion clinics in every Black family’s basement.

At RNG, @AngryBlackLady has debunked that claim time and again.

Margaret Sanger was not a virulent racist: If you don’t believe us, you should read her writing and the interviews she gave.

Check out below what Margaret Sanger said in an interview with the Chicago Defender in 1945, for example:

https://twitter.com/RewireNewsGroup/status/1285675459104178176?s=20

Margaret Sanger, was, however, a virulent ableist and few people talk about it.

Sanger would have supported forcibly sterilizing Britney Spears by preventing her from removing her IUD.

Sanger believed that people with disabilities should be forbidden from procreating. If you don’t believe us, just click below where @AngryBlackLady discusses this:

https://twitter.com/RewireNewsGroup/status/1285678890954952708

Margaret Sanger wanted to stop poor people and the “insane and feeble minded” to stop breeding, irrespective of their race. When she talked about racial betterment, she meant bettering the human race by sterilizing people with disabilities.

Critically, “feeble-mindedness” was often a stand-in for promiscuity. Take the case of Carrie Buck, for example.

Buck conceived a baby out of wedlock (she said that she had been raped) and was institutionalized and sterilized against her will. She filed a lawsuit against Virginia medical authorities. The case ended up at the Supreme Court, where she lost.

In 1927, the Court ruled that Virginia’s compulsory sterilization law was constitutional in a stunningly awful decision case called Buck v. Bell.

In connection with that case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously proclaimed: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The Buck v. Bell decision set the stage for state after state to enact compulsory sterilization laws and prompted a wave of forcible sterilization that hit people of color and poor people the hardest.

Another example is the case of Ann Cooper Hewitt, the heiress to the Cooper Union fortune.

When Hewitt was 3, she was caught with her hand down her pants. This led to doctors declaring her “feeble-minded” followed by a life of abuse at the hands of her socialite mother.

Hewitt’s mother paid to have Hewitt forcibly sterilized so she could get her hands on the multimillion-dollar fortune her daughter was set to inherit. If her daughter had no children, the fortune would be hers.

Hewitt went on to file a lawsuit in 1936 for a half-million in damages. After a lengthy trial, she and her mother settled the lawsuit for $150K.

You can learn more about Hewitt in a book published earlier this year: rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2021/0…

Spears’ situation is not dissimilar from Hewitt’s. For over a decade, her father has wielded control over Spears’ fortune in an apparent attempt to keep his hands in her coffers. He pays himself $16K per month out of his daughter’s salary while allowing Spears only $8K per month

And now he is attempting to forcibly sterilize her. I can only speculate as to why—it’s likely so he can continue to reap the benefits of her hard work—but in any event, he is exploiting the oftentimes corrupt conservatorship system to the detriment of his daughter.

The #FreeBritney movement is a disability rights issue, and it is incumbent upon the reproductive rights and justice movements to continue to center disability justice.

We missed a word in an earlier tweet in this thread and want to get it right. It should've said Britney Spears had a mental health crisis.