So, You Want To Get Yourself Fixed?

A little over a year ago today, on July 11, 2011, which also, by pure coincidence, happened to be World Population Day, I had a tubal ligation. Just before and after the procedure, I was interviewed by a reporter for Vogue Magazine, doing a story on sterilization in terms of reproductive right to choose. I’m hearing from a friend of mine that the story finally ran in the August issue of the magazine. I don’t know if my interview was actually used in the story yet, as I’m not a subscriber to that particular publication and the August issue is not yet on the shelves for purchase. Frankly, I’m just happy to see sterilization talked about more.

When I was getting ready to have my own procedure, it was difficult to find information on it. Sure, I could look at a Wikipedia article and find all sorts of medical details, but personal stories from women who have been there were hard to come by. Many of the personal stories that I did find were of regretful women, often claiming all sorts of ridiculous side effects. Such stories had little credibility as they were mostly only found on the websites of doctors who were selling tubal reversals.

After I had my tubal ligation, I wrote about it. I wrote the sort of story that I was looking for prior to my own procedure, one that told the truth, even the somewhat gross bits, without any sexist ideas about a woman’s need to reproduce to be happy and healthy. I’m sure that I haven’t been the first to do such a thing, writing about my experience, but I did get a lot of attention for it. Even now, a year later, I still get contacted by women thanking me for writing that post, as they seek the same procedure and want to hear the experience of someone who has been there and want some reassurance that their uterus won’t explode. I thank the women for reading and encourage them to write their own stories.

This isn’t a new concept. I’m borrowing the idea from the existence of such sites as ThanksAbortion.com and I’mNotSorry.net, which share women’s positive abortion stories to support women who have undergone or will choose to have abortion procedures, and also serves to counter all the negativity and outright lies of regretful abortion stories on anti-abortion websites.

So here, on this page, I’m collecting my writings leading up to my procedure and following it into one easy to read archive. I’ll also post links to other people’s stories as well as to useful information pages. This page will, obviously, be continuously updated. Unfortunately, as I had a tubal ligation, I have no experience with other sterilization methods, so most of this page will be about TLs. If anyone would like to share their story about or information on other sterilization procedures, please leave a link in the comments section of this page. The comments section is also where any may ask any questions that they might have (I can’t give medical advice, just personal experience.)

My tubal ligation experience:

• Getting Sterilized At 22 (Seeing the doctor)
• Sterilized On World Population Day (The big day!)
• Tubal Ligation Scars

Advice:

• 10 Tips For Getting Fixed

Anti-Sterilization Crap

• Countdown To Tubal: Post Tubal Ligation Syndrome? (Thoughts on a medical myth.)
• Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… (This site was hit by a spam bot selling fertility treatment and tubal ligation reversal.)

Sterilization musings

• Countdown To Tubal: What Childfree Means To Me
• Countdown To Tubal: Envy?
• Looking Forward (My life after tubal.)
• What About Him? (When people try to use hypothetical men to control women’s fertility.)
• The Day I Broke Free (Some sterilization art.)
• Happily Sterile (Rage comics aren’t real art, are they?)

Dealing with opposition:

• Countdown To Tubal: Bingo-ed
• Troll-Mail
• Bingoed: Yes, I DO Know

Other people’s stories:

• Scotia’s Tubal Ligation Story
• My Path to Childfreedom (Alicia C. Domina‘s tubal ligation story.)

(If you’d like to share your story, add a link to it in the comments section!)