A harrowing recent ProPublica report tells the stories of two Black women in Florida who were forced to have cesarean sections despite clearly stating they didn’t want them – a reminder that medical coercion is alive and well in the American healthcare system.
In the case of Cherise Doyley, the state had filed an emergency petition. The state and hospital wanted to force Doyley to undergo a C-section “in the interest of her unborn child”, ProPublica reported. Doyley, who worked as a birthing doula, had been clear that she didn’t want a C-section unless there was an emergency. At an hours-long online court hearing conducted from her hospital bedside – while she was in labor – a judge ruled she could continue to labor, but if there were an emergency, the hospital could operate whether she wanted it or not. Hours later, she woke up to find herself being wheeled into surgery – doctors said the baby’s heart rate had dropped for seven minutes overnight – and she gave birth via C-section.
As dystopian as this sounds, Doyley’s story is one among several of its kind, where pregnant people are being forced to undergo medical procedures such as C-sections. And it’s right on theme with the broader ways the US government is working to strip women of their bodily autonomy and their rights.
In most cases, Americans have a constitutional right to refuse unwanted medical procedures. But when it comes to pregnant people, state courts have long disagreed on whether the fetus’s or the mother’s rights should take precedence. Depending on the state’s determination, pregnant people can even face criminalization for refusing interventions like unwanted C-sections.
Meanwhile, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states clearly that “a decisionally capable pregnant woman’s decision to refuse recommended medical or surgical interventions should be respected”, and that “the use of coercion is not only ethically impermissible but also medically inadvisable.”
Still, pregnant patients’ wishes are being regularly disregarded, with Black people meeting the worst of this oppression. Black patients are twice as likely to face coercion and unwanted procedures during birth, and 25% more likely to receive unscheduled C-sections than white patients are. Researchers have also found that Black and white patients declined care at the same rate, yet practitioners were more likely to accept the wishes of white patients, and more likely to go ahead with the procedure without consent when it came to pregnant Black people. This disparity falls right in line with the ways that Black women have historically been subject to all kinds of reproductive abuse, from forced sterilization to unethical experimentation.
More recently, the abuse and neglect that Black American patients regularly face while giving birth has intersected with the fetal personhood debate, with courts deciding in some instances that hospitals can override patients’ decisions in favor of the perceived health of the unborn children. That debate has taken on new prominence in the wake of the supreme court overturning Roe v Wade. The Trump administration has made it clear through its actions that it sees a fetus as more valuable than its mother , and now doctors and hospitals are self-deputizing to help enforce and maintain that assertion.
Another deeply troubling and dangerous aspect of all this is the way the fetal personhood crowd positions pregnant people as incubators, while the government dictates that they must give birth, how exactly they should be doing it and even when they need to stop.
Doyley may be a Black woman living in a red state, but her experience of medical coercion didn’t only happen because of her race (although the statistics clearly show her Blackness probably contributed greatly to why she wasn’t listened to). It’s also a sign of just how far the government plans to go in stripping pregnant people of their bodily autonomy.
If more states dig their heels in on the fetal personhood movement, that will mean even more vulnerable patients at risk of being forced into procedures they don’t want. And while Black pregnant patients may suffer more than anyone else under these draconian conditions, this madness won’t stop with them. It’s a terrifying sign of what’s to come.
