“There was a period of confrontation every time we had sex," says Jen. “Sometimes I would give in and just take a morning after pill." If she asked him to share the cost [$20 to $30 each time] he would tell her she was being paranoid. Eventually Jen lost patience: “I said I won’t have sex with you without a condom, that’s the condition of my consent. And he seemed okay with that and said he understood.” But after that, things got weird. You might not be familiar with the term “reproductive coercion”. Few people are. But this hidden phenomenon is about to gain far greater prominence in public discourse around family violence with the release of a new discussion paper from national family planning organisation Marie Stopes Australia.

Put simply, reproductive coercion - sometimes called reproductive control - describes behaviour that attempts to exert power and control over a woman’s reproductive autonomy. These behaviours might include a partner, usually male, forcing a woman to have a baby, or to terminate a pregnancy. Or contraceptive sabotage, like flushing contraceptive pills down the toilet, and deliberately breaking or removing condoms. Closely linked to family violence, reproductive control is an under-researched phenomenon that can have a significant impact on women’s health but has little public recognition. With the growing social focus on family violence and gender equity, Marie Stopes Australia felt compelled to turn the spotlight on reproductive coercion, says chief executive officer Michelle Thompson.

After Jen told her boyfriend she wouldn’t have sex without a condom, he insisted they turn the lights off during sex. She became suspicious he was removing or breaking the condom surreptitiously, a practice known as “stealthing”. Eventually she confronted him and he admitted it, saying it was no big deal. He promised not to do it again but did, between six and 10 times over the next six months. “Each time I’d be in tears and and he’d make me feel like I was depriving him of something. Or he’d say he found me so attractive, he got caught up in the moment, and just couldn’t help himself.” Then her fears were realised: Jen got pregnant.

Raised by deeply religious, pro-life parents who she could not turn to for advice, and with no plans to have children, it was Jen’s personal nightmare. She lives in Queensland, where abortion remains in the criminal code. He boyfriend said he would support Jen with whatever she chose, and paid for half the abortion costs (about $600). “The fact he was good about the pregnancy distracted me from how I got pregnant in the first place,” she says. Sophie Keramidopoulos, the counselling manager at Marie Stopes, has been told of partners tampering with contraception, or removing intrauterine contraceptive devices by force. Partners will also isolate women to the point where they feel they have no choice but to have an abortion, she says. “We’ve had men ring and book an [abortion] appointment for their partner and drive them to the clinic repeatedly. They’ll threaten to leave them, or hurt them physically: ‘If you don’t have this abortion I’ll beat this baby out of you’,” she says.

Women who experience violence from an intimate partner are twice as likely to have their male partner refuse contraception, twice as likely to have an unplanned pregnancy, three times as likely to give birth as a teen and significantly more likely to have five or more births, according to the Marie Stopes discussion paper. Pregnancy is also a time when violence toward women is known to increase. In Queensland, the family planning service Children By Choice, is a rare example of a service that specifically asks its clients about reproductive control. It found one in eight people who contacted its counselling service had experienced reproductive coercion, and 60 per cent of those women were in their twenties. Reproductive coercion doesn’t just occur between partners. It can also operate in a structural way, in the prevailing, socially accepted attitudes in communities, the Marie Stopes paper says.