What the Trend of Sterilization Reveals

Fertility is a gift, not a problem. 

According to an NPR report, more women are seeking sterilization. For example, at Bozeman Health Deaconess Hospital in Montana, more women in their twenties and thirties are asking not for their tubes to be tied—a reversible procedure—but to be removed, a permanent procedure.  

This is another sign that women’s fertility has been largely pathologized, treated as a bug rather than a feature of being a woman. It’s as if a woman’s body is presumed better when more like a man’s—without the ability to bear children... somehow in the name of “women’s rights.” 

But studies cited in the article suggest these women may regret their decision. Dr. Kavita Arora, the chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Ethics, described a patient: “She wanted to have autonomous control over her body, and this was her way of ensuring she was the person who got to make the decisions.”  

Rather than practice sexual self-restraint, the patient’s desire for “control” led her to deny the potential of motherhood.