25 June 2021 - Britney Spears asks court to end her conservatorship
Britney Spears speaks out against 'abusive' conservatorship at hearing
(BBC News, 24/06/2021)
Britney Spears has launched a blistering attack on the "abusive" conservatorship that has controlled her life for 13 years.
Speaking in open court for the first time in the case, she accused her father of controlling her "100,000%", adding "I just want my life back".
She said she had been denied the right to have more children, and put on the psychiatric drug lithium against her wishes.
Conservatorships explained: What they are and who they're supposed to help
Harmeet Kaur (CNN, 24/06/2021)
When Britney Spears asked a court this week to end her years-long conservatorship, she renewed attention on a little-understood section of US law.
A convervatorship is a legal arrangement that gives a court-appointed individual, known as the conservator, the power to handle the financial and/or personal affairs of another adult who has been deemed incapacitated.
There's been heightened interest in conservatorships since the February release of The New York Times documentary "Framing Britney Spears," which explores the singer's career and her court-ordered conservatorship, in place since 2008.
Britney Spears' testimony not only revealed what she's gone through, but our complicity in it
Maegan Carberry (NBC News, 24/06/2021)
In late-pandemic America, Britney Spears’ conservatorship has become the lens through which we can see so many of our society's failings — or, at least, we're supposed to. We’re supposed to see that the way we viewed and treated women sucked, that the media sucked for participating in the patriarchy, Justin Timberlake sucked for profiting from it and that we sucked for salivating over every morsel of it. (We definitely "knew" Spears' ex-husband, Kevin Federline, sucked at the time, but in retrospect maybe we shouldn’t have judged him so harshly either.)
But all of this navel-gazing has been packaged for our consumption almost as neatly as her schoolgirl sex appeal was for the cover of "Rolling Stone" — and equally without her participation.
Britney Spears’s Forced IUD Is a Chilling Example of the Threats to Reproductive Freedom
Emma Specter (Vogue, 24/06/2021)
Let’s say there’s a woman, aged 39, who’s been working diligently—in the form of playing sold-out shows—for the last decade. She already has two teenage sons, and she and her longtime partner have been talking about trying for another baby—but they can’t, because the woman has a birth control device implanted in her body that she’s not allowed to remove. If any of that sounds off, you might understand why the recent revelation that under her conservatorship, Britney Spears has not been allowed to have her IUD removed sparked so much outrage.
“I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” Spears said on Wednesday in a public plea to be freed from the legal and financial control of a team including her father, Jamie Spears. “I was told right now in the conservatorship I am not able to get married or have a baby.” Spears told the court that she had asked to have the IUD removed “so I could start trying to have another baby, but this so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have...any more children.”