A little harsh there Stacy. I would like to see the age group of that percentage of women doing tubal ligations.

My guess is that many of them are in their 40′s and have already done their “procreating”

My wife did it after our 3rd child for medical reasons and not just to sterilize.

We did it during the c- delivery of my 4th kid. We sort of got talked into it. The doctor did it for free, since he was all in there anyway. I regret it.

I find myself startled that you are startled. This is newsworthy how? A 20 min minor surgery that a first year student could perform with a local.  I made the appt when child number four stood and nursed. Went back to work the same afternoon.
Certainly is more efficient than 50 years of Trojans.
But maybe you like Trojans.

I had twins when I was 29.  With a 22 month old and now fraternal twins I made the decision not to have more children.  I couldn’t take the pill so this seemed to be my best choice.  As the mother of fraternal twins I knew the chances of my having another set of twins were great.  We struggled to provide for our three children but we have never been sorry.  We all need to do what is best for our family.  I am pro-life so I would never have had an abortion but preventing is different than ending.

When I first read this piece, it had zero comments. I stopped back in to see what others had to say and I guess I’m a bit..surprised. I read this with sadness – sadness for what our culture has become. Perhaps it’s my upbringing, and perhaps it’s because I’m a Catholic,  but I think the statistics you’ve highlighted show something about mental/spiritual states, more than physical states.

The contraceptive culture, in general, is wreaking havoc on families. I disagree with the theory that God gave us science for family planning. He created us with the physical capacity to create life. I can’t comprehend willfully depriving myself of that capacity.

I do not judge the choices of others, or the statements made by previous commenters. Just wanted you, Stacy, to know that you’re not alone in your feelings on this subject. And keep up the fantastic writing!

If the doctor (well, it will be a midwife most likely) offers to “snip” me after our fourth (if we’re fortunate enough to get there) I’ll tell him/her to kindly take the scalpel and stick it where the sun don’t shine.

ha! I’ve always liked that turn of phrase.

Dachau?  Really?  Stacy, although I only infrequently agree with you (and hardly ever comment), I generally enjoy your attempts at provoking people.  This one’s bad, though.  The subject matter itself seems hardly worthy of such outrage…..and then you have to name drop a concentration camp.

If you click through to his piece on the 50th anniversary of the pill, then follow the link to the source of his statistic, you’ll find that over 50% of women 40-44 go with some form of surgical intervention. It’s been a loooong time since I had to take a statistics class and it’s 1:47 AM here so I’m not about to try to do real math, but I’d have to guess that proportion of that segment of the 15-44 age range drastically skews the data. I’d also be willing to bet that with pregnancy risks – both to the mother and the child – increasing around age 35, another significant chunk of those voluntary sterilizations come from the 35-39 group.

I’ve only ever been to this blog once or twice before. I’m only here tonight because a blog I read pretty regularly recommended it because of a different post. If idiocy like this is typical here, I can’t imagine I’ll be back all that often.

Maybe, but there are only so many hours in the day. How about if I give you a list of the blogs I like and you can suggest which ones I should skip to free up time so I can read posts comparing middle-age women to Nazis because they’ve decided they’re done procreating? :-p

Perhaps it won’t look quite so idiotic when I’m not tired and cranky. Good night.

Andy,

There’s a reason why this blog is considered a heavyweight in the conservative blogosphere. I’ve been following for a few months and this is the first time I  have outright disagreed with anything Stacy has written. Stick around a little while longer and I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do.

Here’s an article that I reposted on my facebook wall a few days ago that you might like to read to get a better idea of the quality writing style that we are often get:  http://theothermccain.com/2011/08/02/that-evil-hour/

I’d also add that non-contracepting couples divorce at a miniscule rate.  I’m not suggesting that contracepting couples are doomed to have failed marriages, but it’s difficult to argue that using contraception enhances marriages when the statistics decidedly refute that claim.

“Correlation does not prove causation” – Robert Stacy McCain on some topic a few weeks ago (i’m sure this phrase has been around for a while too).

Telling me that non-contracepting couples divorce less frequently in no way convinces me that contraceptives are the underlying cause. I’d also like to see your source on that because it might be an interesting read. 

Marriages fail for a vast multitude of reasons, some of which could be marrying for lust instead of love, forgetting that “through better or worse, to death do us part” really means until one spouse dies, adultury, etc.

Statistics can be read by 10 different people and 10 different conclusions can be drawn from them. 

 I would suspect that close on to 99% of female sterilization is after 40 AND after the woman feels she is done with having more children.

Darleen, I can tell you anecdotally that the obstetric profession appears to have adopted an attitude I call “Two and Tie ‘Em.” That is to say, after her second childbirth, a woman is more or less expected to get a tubal ligation.

Our second pregnancy was twins (who are now 18), and during one of my wife’s pre-natal exams, the OB suggested that if she wanted a tubal ligation, it was cheaper to get it at the time of the delivery (one hospitalization, which would already be covered by insurance) than to wait to do it later. My wife called me up in tears, feeling as if this doctor had accused her of being an unfit mother.

I would suspect that, among married women 30-44 with at least two children, the percentage who have undergone surgical sterilization is much higher than 17.8 percent. And while I perfectly well understand why some women might choose this, I also know that this procedure is actively promoted by some obstetricians and further know how peer pressure can function in such matters: Women who have gotten their “tubes tied” (to employ the vernacular) will sometimes become evangelists for the practice, praising the worry-free pleasures of post-sterilization sex and commending the procedure to their friends and relatives. I would be interested to see a study examining the likelihood that any given woman would undergo tubal ligation if one of her sisters has already done so.

Well, it’s a free country and people can do whatever they want. My point is that there seems to be an effort to trivialize such decisions, to portray a very drastic measure — surgical sterilization — as a routine matter of little consequence.

Stacy, I for one don’t disagree with what you’re saying here in spirit, but bringing Dachau into it is just a little bit over the top.

But after kid number 4 or 5, I see absolutely no reason why having a few snips is wrong on a psychological level . . .

I appreciate your comments, Jamie, and I will introduce you to readers of the blog as a high school classmate of my eldest daughter.

What this post was aiming at was our culture’s ”blithe attitude” toward surgical sterilization. This is truly a radical and drastic measure, and I find myself annoyed by the jocular “snip snip” attitude toward it, as if what was being discussed was getting your ears pierced or buying a condo time-share.

The title’s use of the phrase “surgical sterilization” was intended to express the gravity of the matter. And while I grant that it was a cheap rhetorical stunt to finish the post with a reference to Nazi prison guards, I will point out that the Nazis believed themselves to be engaged in a scientifically enlightened effort at population control, so that the unfair analogy was at least relevant.

As you might know from your reading, Jamie, Ellen G. White was quite concerned about the health of women being impaired by excessive child-bearing. Yet she saw this as resulting from the sexual selfishness of men whose wives were almost constantly pregnant (in an age when abstinence was virtually the only method of effective contraception). What Sister White saw in such situations was a lack of Christian empathy, a failure of husbands to show true goodwill toward their wives. 

You know our family, Jamie, and so you know that there was a six-year gap between the twins (children #2 and #3) and our fourth, with children #4, #5 and #6 being born at almost exactly two-year intervals. Child #6 (Reagan) was born when my wife was 39. The risks of medical complications, both for mother and child, increase greatly after age 40, and so we retired from the Baby-Making Derby at that point. All six of our children were born healthy, and it seemed we might be tempting fate if we continued further. We had been greatly blessed, and didn’t want to impose on the Lord beyond that.

Having lots of a kids is a contraceptive in its own right, given the difficulty of finding sufficient marital privacy in a home full of children. And I often joke that the reason I support abstinence education for young people is that, if you don’t get used to doing without sex before marriage . . .

Husbands always laugh at that joke. Wives, not so much.

Having lots of a kids is a contraceptive in its own right, given the difficulty of finding sufficient marital privacy in a home full of children
Ha!  We’ve only got two and yet this seems so true already.  

..and here we go again.  Lets blame all our problems on the decline of religion.  I have three kids from my decade long marriage.  We had all three while under the influence of “be fruitful and multiply” and “fill your quiver” type pentecostal hypocrites.  I love my children and raise them right, but to say that the solution to our problems is more of THAT type of thinking is foolish.  I wish I had waited until later to have kids, or not had them at all.  Since we couldn’t have sex outside marriage, and sex was meant to produce children for the Lord, we did it…and my wife almost ended up in a mental institution from it.  Sorry folks, I’m not going along with this one…snip snip all the way.

Well done, Jamie — you took your initial winning formula of incomprehension, rhetorical failure, and personal insult, and turned it up to 11. With a healthy dose of shooting the messenger thrown in for good measure. Always the mark of a winning argument.

Bye now!

RSM

I guess it depends on the doctors involved. I was 45 with 4 kids and ready to ensure my infertility and had a doctor actively try to discourage me from a tubal.

I just couldn’t see myself change my mind with the prospect of enjoying grandkids on the horizon.

“Be fruitful and multiply” does not mean to have children until your uterus falls out.  It means to have the children that you can financially and psychologically PROPERLY raise, and then STOP.

Having bad fruit is worse than having no fruit.  The prisons, the ghettos, the trailer parks, and the welfare rolls are filled with people whose parents did not know when to stop.  Or do you enjoy paying extra in taxes to support these people and the bureaucrats that enable them?

Seven billion people on a planet that can’t feed two-thirds of them, and you’re worried about a segment of the population with sufficient personal to stop contributing to the future famine?  When did you turn LIBERAL on us?