Screaming in the Dark

(Image from Biddy Tarot)

Just over a year ago I got my tubes tied. (I’m still on the fence about how personal I want to get and if I want to share things that people who know me may not know. But with the current political climate I feel like this is important and necessary.) I made the decision to get my tubes tied, of course first and foremost because I don’t want to have any biological children. I often joke that it’s my hobby to raise other people’s children, especially teenagers. But if it were not for what I was already seeing happening in the Supreme Court I would not have done it. I was always carful enough but had the emergency safety net of an abortion available if it ever had to come to that.

Before I had the surgery I told some friends and was honestly shocked by the number of people who though it was okay to say “you should just make your husband get a vasectomy.” He and I talked about it, he wasn’t comfortable with it, and last I checked it’s his body. I would never even think of pushing him to do something to his body that he doesn’t want. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? If the roles were reversed and I was telling my friends “yeah, my husband is making me get my tubes tied” there would be an intervention and no one would like him anymore. Me getting my tubes tied was 100% my decision, I actually had to kind of talk my husband into it. He had some totally understandable concerns.

For me the process was surprisingly easy and smooth. I think it was a combination of luck and having good medical professionals and my age, I was 37 when I had the surgery. If anything the process was almost too fast and made my head spin. Zero regrets! I just was a lot for my brain to catch up with. I told my primary care doctor I was thinking about it, she put in a referral, I had an appointment with the surgeon, and then after the insurance mandated 30 day waiting period I had the procedure.

Everyone on this planet should be able to have this experience where they go to a doctor and can get the medical care that they need. We should all be trusted to know our own minds, our own life paths, and our own bodies. I hear so many horror stories about people wanting this procedure and being denied. Being told they may have a male partner in the future who wants children. Or being required to have their husband give his approval. What fucking year is it? For me, I did a couple months of research before I even brought up the idea with my husband. Then there was a couple months of us talking and researching before I talked to my doctor. I knew what I was talking about and I think most people do. I have never heard a story of a man being told “what if you have a wife in the future who wants children?” The funny thing about that is that I don’t know any women who regret getting their tubes tied, but I do have a male friend who had is vasectomy reversed.

I know that abortion is a complicated and controversial issue. I suspect that if you have read this far you know what side of the debate I come down on. But the interesting thing to me is that the people who claim to want to reduce the number of abortions are also against the things like birth control, like surgical sterilization, like comprehensive sex education, the things that actually are proven to reduce the number of abortions. It’s almost as if it’s not actually about abortion or the fetus.

The truth is that the people in power (i.e. people with money because in our world money is power) always have and always will have access to safe abortions whether or not they are legal. Their wives, daughters, and mistresses don’t have to worry. The people who do have to worry are the people who are already suffering, because that is how these things work. People who already have trouble getting access to medical care that they can afford might struggle to get birth control. Despite what some very vocal people claim, access to birth control does not make people more likely to have sex, it just makes the sex they were going to have anyway safe. Besides that I don’t believe that sex is a sin. I believe that we as humans (for humans that want it) have a right to that pleasure and connection. I don’t have a problem with people who believe that sex is a sin unless they want to force me to agree with them. Against premarital sex? Great, don’t have it.

Then there’s the issue that the abortion ban laws are being written by people who seem to have skipped health class and never bothered to know anything about a woman’s body. An ectopic pregnancy is not viable and will most likely kill the mother if not terminated. There is no procedure to reimplant the fetus in the uterus. It has never happened. Believe me, if it did exist my close friend who had been trying to get pregnant for a year would have had it done. Instead she lost a fallopian tube and was glad to be alive. Women’s bodies do not have some magical system that can prevent pregnancy if they are raped. I almost don’t want to bring up the rape issue because why does a woman have to lose control of her body in order to be granted some control? How does that make sense. You can have consensual sex using birth control and still get pregnant. I know someone who was on the pill and usually her and her boyfriend also used condoms. One night they skipped the condom and her son just turned seven. She did everything right and still got pregnant. Or families that want a child but find out through medical screening that the child will have a debilitating illness and not make it to a year old. So we are now requiring that family to go through pregnancy and birth and the pain of that? Not to mention the exorbitant cost of caring for a sick child. How is that right for anyone involved, including the child? Then there is the issue of miscarriage, often a woman’s body does not completely expel the fetus or all the tissue if there is a miscarriage. This can lead to infection and death if not treated quickly and correctly. Or, and there are already stories about this happening, the baby has died in the womb and the woman is forced to continue carrying a nonviable often wanted pregnancy for some amount of time before they can be treated. The way some laws are being written doctors are not allowed to provide the medical care these women need. Having to go though something like that is unimaginable to me, the only word I can think of for that is torture.

Sometimes torture feels like the point of all this, like some people believe we should be punished for having sex. I grew up in a very liberal town and still my health class felt like a year long lesson in all the bad things that would happen if you ever had sex. No conversation about consent, pleasure, alternatives (mutual masturbation, oral sex… you know, fun stuff that won’t get you pregnant), just these are the diseases you will get and this is how hard it is to have a child. (Not the place for this discussion but I will add that sex ed needs to also include conversations about gay sex and people who are asexual.)

There is this mythical woman that some people want to talk about who is supposedly using abortion as birth control. From the little bit I know, not from personal experience, abortion is extremally hard physically and emotionally. Based on what I’ve heard about what it’s really like, that woman doesn’t exist. But tell me this, if she did, does she sound like someone who should be raising children? One of my amazing friends on Facebook, when the news came out about Roe vs. Wade, posted about how abusive her childhood was and that she wishes her mother had had an abortion. It led to a really interesting conversation in the comment section. I would say it was about 50/50 for people who were glad to be alive and people who felt so damaged by what they went through in their childhoods that they would have rather not been born. So don’t say that people would rather be born, it’s not true.

Then there are the women who are pregnant themselves and where they are in life. Women who are forced to leave school and statistically are not likely to return. Women who have to walk away from careers they love and either never come back or start again at the bottom and work their way back up. Women who already have children and either financially or emotionally just cannot have another. Women’s liberation is very closely tied to the release of the birth control pill because suddenly there were options. Maybe we should be asking what it is about women that frighten the powers that be so much and maybe if we’re so scary everyone should be listening to women and raising them up. Maybe if the powers that be are so afraid it’s because we’re stronger than them.

I’m very aware this is a hot button issue. I hope I don’t have to turn off comments on this post but I will if it gets ugly. Whatever you may think about my stance on abortion and healthcare think of it this way, all I want for every child in the world is for them to be wanted and for their parents to have the resources needed to care for them. We may disagree on the best way to get there but how can anyone argue with that?

Note: I am very aware that this issue also effects trans men. The language I use is not intended to exclude, once the rant go going the language became less careful.