America Should Ask Why More Women Are Choosing Sterilization

Dear Husband often sends me links to articles that he knows darned well will spark a blog post within me. This time it was a Facebook post about a study that showed that after the reversal of Roe V. Wade, there was a sharp increase in women seeking tubal ligation, and that the numbers grew greater month after month. And this trend wasn’t just noted in red states where women’s rights to access abortions were taken away. This was in blue states as well, because all women had been reminded that their access to healthcare can be legislated away at the whim of Republicans at any time, and that is truly terrifying.

Reading this article hit me on several levels. I’m 61, so I’m way past childbearing age, but I still take this issue personally. Even as a child myself, I knew I never wanted to have children. I think the only two people on earth who didn’t apply a massive amount of pressure on me about that decision were my own mother, and my sister, who also didn’t want children. With everyone else, it was always a knowing smirk and a, “You’ll change your mind.”

As if they knew my mind better than I did. As if there was some sort of biological imperative that would take over my mind and body and I would completely abandon the person I was to become a baby-making machine for the greater good. As if I’d meet some man who wanted children, and I’d fall in love with him so madly and deeply that I’d want to provide him with a gift wrapped up in swaddling clothes and sacrifice the rest of my life to that gift so that he’d be happy, because to do otherwise would be incredibly selfish. (But of course, expecting that of me wouldn’t be selfish on his part. Not at all.)

People have warped views of abortions. They think that there are millions of late-term abortions going on, when in fact, they are practically unheard of, and are always for medical reasons. Women are not coldly hopping onto conveyor belts and having arms, legs and heads ripped out of their bellies to be thrown into a massive pile. That’s absurd. And this whole concept of quickening is also absurd. An electrical pulse is the same thing that goes on between your brain cells, but a brain cell could never survive outside of your body either. It’s not life.

If conservatives were really pro-life, they would care about life beyond the point of birth. Here are the things that they don’t care about:

As of 2020, of all the countries in the world, America ranked 65th in maternal mortality rates. This is an embarrassment. We are one of the richest countries in the world, and yet, as a pregnant woman, you have a much higher chance of surviving if you live in places like Turkmenistan, Estonia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Singapore, Kazakhstan, or Russia. They’re so quick to disparage Iran, but we run neck-in-neck with them in this area as well. Shame on us.
Also, according to 2022 Census Bureau data, 80% of single parent families are headed by a mother, and according to the 2020-2022 data in the KIDS COUNT^® Data Center, just 23% of U.S female headed families reported receiving any amount of child support. Are the conservatives doing anything about those deadbeat dads? No. They’re too busy making sure the women are being forced to have children that they don’t want and/or can’t afford.
They also aren’t supporting affordable childcare initiatives, paid school lunches, food stamps, affordable healthcare, social services to keep children off the streets, drug rehabilitation, programs to thwart the school-to-prison pipeline, and affordable education.

What they do care about is having plenty of people to fill low-paying blue collar industrial jobs, plenty of people so poor that their only way out is to join the military and fight our wars for us, and plenty of people so desperate that they will commit crimes, go to prison, and become slave labor at 25 cents an hour, so it’s important to have lots of children born to lots of women who are kept in poverty with no time to prioritize education for themselves or their children.

So, yeah. Abortion? We can’t have that. We have to control these wombs at any cost, so they’ll keep on cranking out those babies for us.

And people wonder why we should get upset that our wombs are under someone else’s control. The solution is simple, according to the many trolls who responded to the Facebook post mentioned above. We should just “keep our damned legs closed!”

Well, that implies that all women are out of control wh*res who have no concept of family planning. It doesn’t allow for the fact that no birth control is 100% effective, some of us are made very sick by birth control, and r*pe happens a heck of a lot more than you losers are willing to admit. It also ignores the fact that it takes two to tango, and why are men never asked to keep their sprockets in their pockets? Why does all the responsibility, and all the blame, fall on the women? And why, when things go wrong, are the men the first to run out the door (assuming the women survive the birth to be left holding the bag, that is)?

Even in cases when couples remain intact, according to the Pew Research Center, even though women are now bringing almost as much money into the household as men, they are still picking up a heavier load of the caregiving and household chores, so the prospect of adding a child into the mix is always going to be more of a sacrifice for her.

I really don’t feel qualified to address the myriad health issues that can come up during pregnancy. But if you want to read an article that describes some of the many health reasons why a human being with even just a single ounce of compassion within them would not object to someone having an abortion, I have just the article for you. Hop on over to substack and read the article by Jessica Valenti entitled My Favorite Abortion, and you’ll understand why this obstructive legislation is putting a lot of women’s lives in danger for no good reason.

So yes, there are a lot of reasons why women wind up not wanting children, or not wanting this particular pregnancy at this particular point in time. And while abortion is usually not their first choice, it is certainly an option that they should have a right to consider, and one that, as an adult, should not be taken away from them by random white men who have agendas of their own.

If abortion isn’t an option, I can certainly understand why women would seek tubal ligation. And if you are certain you don’t want any children, or any more children, then why not? But oh, my god, the outrage in the comments on that Facebook feed! They really were over the top. But I wasn’t all that shocked, because when I first attempted to get my tubes tied in 1998, when I was 33 years old, I had to go to 10 gynecologists before I found one who was willing to do it. Seriously. Ten.

Their reasoning? I wasn’t married, and I was depriving my future husband of children. A husband had to sign off on such procedures. I might change my mind. I might sue them later. I might become hysterical. It was the wrong thing to do. It was morally wrong. It was against nature. I would regret it someday. I think the only reason the last doctor acquiesced is that he had seen that I had gone to 9 other doctors, so he realized that I wasn’t kidding.

Ironically, it turned out that I needed to have a complete hysterectomy a year later due to endometriosis. If I had only waited 12 months, I’d have saved myself a lot of hassle. Hindsight.

But the arrogance of these doctors, thinking that they had the right to make these decisions for me, and that they had a right to predict my future. As if, because I was a woman, I was incapable of making my own health care decisions, and that they, total strangers, had to intervene, because clearly they knew best, whether I liked it or not. No part of a male body has ever been legislated in the history of this country, and it never will be. Because clearly they know best.

I know that when Roe V. Wade was overturned, I stopped feeling like an American citizen. You took control of part of my body without my permission. (Well, yeah, technically I don’t have it anymore anyway, but it’s the principle of the thing.) If you can do that, I’m no longer an autonomous human being. You may as well have tagged my ear like a dairy cow. You have domesticated me. If that’s the case, how can I be an American? If I still had an “ear” to be “tagged”, I’d chop it off, too.

Another point to ponder: As we seem to be dismantling democracy all around us, and since we can no longer ignore the downhill slide we are on due to the global warming that we have brought upon ourselves, would you want to bring a child into this world? I wouldn’t. It’s hard to say when or how, but I’m increasingly convinced that things are not going to end well, and it would be cruel to subject a child to the chaos that is bound to come.

So, yes, ladies, if you don’t want children, get your tubes tied while you still can. They have no right to make us their political marionettes. But I guarantee you that once they figure out how you’re getting around their efforts to take control of you, they’ll start legislating tubal ligations, too. Because this was never about morality. It was always about power.