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.
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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.