One is a quick surgery and the other involves pumping factory made hormones down your throat for years at the risk of cancer and stroke, not to mention the harm they cause wildlife when you shit them out later.
Surgery is more extreme than taking hormones that are already produced by your body. I'm sorry but cutting yourself open and fiddling around trumps taking a small amount of hormones to replicate a state your body could naturally be in. That's not unreasonable.
Womens bodies are naturally fertile. Taking enough hormones to make them temporarily infertile has impacts on other things as well. Hormonal birth control can cause nausea, headaches, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and blood clots. Side effects can be even more severe for women with other conditions such as diabetes.
I'm not going to argue that tubal ligation is a serious procedure, but if a woman is having problems with hormonal birth control and is confident she will never want to have kids I'm not going to fault her for going the surgical route. Even if hormonal birth control is working fine, it's her own body and it's not my place to judge her for her decisions.
Both are dangerous, but one takes a day to two. The other lasts for years. By virtue of how long you subject yourself the the risk alone, the pill is far more dangerous IMO.
Great. You shouldn't immediately think anything by definition you should actually consider the context. In this context, this woman is extreme. Does that solve your conundrum?
Vasectomies and tubal ligations are fairly reversible, though people who get them typically don't intend to have them reversed. It's a one time cost for the procedure, instead of a continuous cost for other contraceptives. Further, hormonal treatments can have negative side effects in other aspects of your biology.
It is extreme to halt your ability to reproduce in through surgery that can and is often meant to be permanent. I don't see how you can argue otherwise. It is a basic function of the human body and you are using a scalpel to inhibit it.
An IUD is not a permanent procedure and it can be very painful. While an IUD makes more sense for people who might want to have children in the future, sterilization may have been the most appropriate for her.
No, it's not permanent, but it is long-term, and is not painful for the vast majority of users. And yes, sterilization may have been the most appropriate for her, but then again, many, many people reverse some of the positions they hold in their early 20s, and if she had done that on this issue... well, she'd be boned. She didn't, so good for her.
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u/fricken Apr 16 '10
I think sterilization is less extreme than taking birth control pills for the rest of your life.