Tubal ligation procedures denied to young women who don’t want children

Are You Kidding?

Someone from the National Sexuality Resource Center (NSRC) sent this to me himself :

Ever since Lauren Green was a little girl, she knew she wasn’t interested in motherhood. . . . [T]hough she’s tried, and will try again, Green has thus far been denied any permanent form of birth control, specifically tubal ligation.
. . .
“[Planned Parenthood of Boston**] said it was much too permanent and weren’t going to give it to me, plus my insurance wasn’t going to cover it,” recalls Green. What’s more, according to Green, “It was all and only about my age.” She was twenty-two at the time.

Green’s experience is not that unusual. Though no actual laws have ever been put into place, most OBGYNs refuse to provide women under thirty with permanent forms of contraception.

This story is a familiar one to many of us. The founder of No Kidding! International, Jerry Steinberg, writes fo a similar experience on his website. Fortunately, thigs appear to have changed for men. As he has mentioned in many interviews, Vincent Ciaccio prepared well, and at the age of 22-23 had three urologists agree to perform the surgery. However, from what I hear, the quest for women today is far closer to the ordeal Jerry went through decades ago.

How founded is the fear that young sterilized people will change their minds? Vincent has crossed that magical 30 threshold, and has no regrets. He would make the same decision today as he did at 23. Has he changed, was it a 'big decade'? Absolutely. However, there appears to be something about this particular decision that, if made, tends to stick. Casual feelings about not wanting to parent may indeed fade, but the deep conviction that I have known in those who have had vasectomies and tubals is quite a different matter. Perhaps a decision that is so against the grain of our society is particularly hard-won, and the choice to make it permanent rarely taken lightly. Perhaps it stems from something less ephemeral than those qualities which fluxuate in early youth - an instinct, or even something genetic, that reflects an internal, unchanging condition.

By the by, congratulations to my favourite hunk on his vasectomy last week!

For Green and the growing number of women forgoing motherhood, waiting till they’re thirty just isn’t good enough. “It’s a vast limitation of my reproductive rights,” opines Green, thoroughly unimpressed with Dr. Wiener’s approach. “Doctors will say, ‘I don’t like to prescribe elective surgeries for people who don’t need them.’ Whereas if you don’t want to have a baby, you don’t want to have a baby and it feels fairly necessary to me.”

“It’s an issue of agency, and who gets to make that choice,” adds Christine Brooks, a post doctoral fellow studying the purposefully barren at the Institute of Trans Personal Psychology in the Bay Area.

According to Brooks, “The argument that these women might change their minds is a paternalistic argument. It questions a woman’s inner knowing, her own path in life. It also suggests that women don’t know what’s best for them and that they have to defer to a medical authority to make life decisions.”
. . .
Douglas and Michaels explain that the new momism oppresses all women by reducing their worth to childbearing and rearing; that in an overwhelmingly child oriented society, a woman is not complete without a child; she must be the primary caregiver of that child, and she must devote herself utterly to her children. Lest she be called “selfish” or “immature.”

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