I realised, two years into this marriage that pregnancy was his method of
control.

I got out because I was very brave, his second wife was not. She had five
children for him, and when she wasn’t pregnant, he’d beat her. It took her
fifteen years to appreciate what pregnancy means to an abusive man….
ownership.

When you are pregnant with his child you are clearly owned by him, as if
you’ve been branded.

Your suggestion that women who get pregnant as teenagers are equivalent to men who try to force pregnancy on women to control them, and further your suggestion that women who get pregnant as teenagers are a “crazy” that might “outbreed” those of you who didn’t is a social darwinist statement underpinned by racism and classism associated with the stereotype of who those teenage mothers are.

This subject is closed for discussion. If you ever bring it up again in this thread or any other thread where it is unrelated, your ass will be banned so fast you won’t even have time to squeal about how your sane, good-decision making skills deserve better.

This, btw, is your last “stop being an asshole” warning.

This article is about teenaged girls being coerced into pregancy. I would think that any teenaged pregnancy is universally considered a “bad thing”, and if it’s deliberate, then somebody is making a drastic and selfish (and in this case, cruel) mistake.

And yes, I think that I made better decisions when I was a teenager. Hence my elitist attitude.

Then why the hell did you bring voluntary teenage mothers into it?

It’s not elitist, except in that it’s clear from your comments that you think you’re better than they are. You aren’t.

Elitist, maybe. I’ll admit it was tasteless, offensive, and elitist. I just get depressed that people with such vicious attitudes find so many nasty reasons (like the one in this thread) to create more children, rather than actually wanting to share their lives with a child.

This is a very racist, classist, and otherwise horrid comment — which, at the same time, contains no argument of substance. You are out of line here.

However, I am a little puzzled that someone who worked with abused women would be floored by this finding.

Me too. It was remarked upon in The Women’s Room what, 35 years ago? Hasn’t this always (since the birth of feminism) been directly tied in with women’s reproductive choice?

It doesn’t surprise me that an insecure man would do this, nor, for that matter, that an insecure woman would get pregnant to try to keep her man. Nor is it shocking that the latter gets way more attention than the former.

In my late teens I had a boyfriend who was convinced, so he told me, that we were destined to have a child who would be the second coming of Christ. (I swear to God, as it were, I am not making this up.) He was never abusive, but talk about insecure and manipulative. He got away with it, at least to the extent that I didn’t instantly leave him, only because I was if anything even more insecure at the time. Luckily I was also smart enough to know that pregnancy at that point in my life would not have been a good career move.

I don’t have them at hand, but I’ve seen a number of studies showing that the more economically independent a woman is the more likely she is to leave an abusive relationship. It’s one of the main reasons divorce rates have climbed so high in recent years, as women’s income has grown closer to parity with men’s they’ve become less financially dependant and more likely to get out of abusive and unhappy marriages. What’s more, that correlation holds up in every country where it’s been studied. Babies are damn expensive, so for an abusive bastard knocking a girl up can be an extremely effective way to trap her and keep her from leaving.

and, as far as auguste’s point, i don’t know if we can blame the republicans for this, but it sure as hell doesn’t help when they’re trying to pass laws requiring women to get permission from the fetus’s father-to-be before having an abortion. (i saw a blog post about that here: http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/2007/08/women-must-get-permission-from-men-for.html)
Talk about a culture of control…

i think it works across the board for left-leaning abusive men, too. it has more to do with power struggles in the relationship than voting politics.

You’re right, of course. I was referring more to the atmosphere of anti-choice (I’m loath to repeat my alliterative construction because it’d be too cutesy) that has been spread by the right wing lo these many years, especially in the Bush era. Doesn’t mean “liberal” men are any less likely to buy into the bullshit, although one would hope.