No, Ma’am, You May Not Know What’s Best For Your Own Uterus

Let me set the scene. I’m 24. I’m very pregnant with my youngest daughter — my last baby, thank you very much, a decision I had made with the full clarity of a woman who has had more than one traumatic experience and does not want to do this again. I ask for a tubal ligation. Simple. Done. Tie the tubes, close me up, let me live out my days never buying another pregnancy test again.

Instead, I got the gynecological equivalent of a security clearance.

Two psychological evaluations. TWO. As in, someone needed to confirm — twice — that I, a grown woman who had already grown, was about to give birth to my second child, and had experienced more than one side of the reproduction debate, was of sound enough mind to decide I didn’t want to do it again. One of the psychiatrists — and I want you to really hear this — looked me dead in the eye and asked:

I’m sorry, come again?

You want me to imagine the death of my living children as a hypothetical fertility checkpoint before you’ll let me have a routine outpatient procedure? Who signed off on that question? Where was that written down and approved as a reasonable thing to ask any woman — let alone a pregnant one? I have never been so close to combusting while laying on a couch in my life.

And then — THEN — after I passed my two-part exam on Not Being Crazy Enough To Not Want Kids, my husband still had to sign a form giving his permission. Not because any law said so. There’s no federal law requiring it. No state law requiring it. I checked. It’s not written down anywhere except in the invisible ink of “well, that’s just how we do it here.” If he’d said no? I don’t get my tubes tied. Full stop. My body, my recovery, my scars, my hormones, my choice to never do the whole gestational thing again — and somewhere in a file cabinet, a stranger’s signature outranked mine.

Cool, cool, cool. Let’s zoom out, because it gets worse.

I want to be really clear about something before I keep going, because I know how this reads: no, there is no LAW today that says a woman needs her husband’s permission to get her tubes tied. That fight was fought and won back in the ’70s — a woman named Judith Ponter sued for exactly this in New Jersey in 1975 and won, and courts have agreed with her ever since. On paper, spousal consent for sterilization is dead.

In practice? It is alive, well, and apparently thriving in exam rooms across America, because there’s no law against a hospital just… deciding to require it anyway as “policy.” I have heard story after story of women being told they needed a husband’s signature, or — if they were unmarried — their FATHER’s signature, like sterilization is a school field trip permission slip.

My own sister, plagued by ovarian cancer, needed her husband’s signature to remove all of her reproductive organs while fighting the cancer. He didn’t give it. She kept one ovary and her uterus. Guess what? She later had the SAME EXACT CANCER AGAIN. Why? Because they didn’t take the parts out that would have prevented it, because her husband said, “No.” One doctor, when directly asked if this was a legal requirement, admitted it wasn’t — it was just his practice’s rule. Bet. Make up a law and enforce it anyway, no big deal.

And it’s not just spousal consent. It’s age. It’s whether you already have kids. It’s whether the doctor personally has decided you’ll regret it — despite the fact that the actual professional guidance from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says point blank that doctors should not impose age or parity requirements and should respect a woman’s reproductive autonomy as the primary concern. So even the professionals whose job this is have said “hey, maybe let women decide,” yet doctors are out here still gatekeeping like it’s 1962.

And don’t even get me started on abortion, because we all know where that’s gone.

As of right now, 13 states have total abortion bans. Thirteen. States where — regardless of your circumstances, your health, your life plans, your already-existing three kids at home — the decision about your own pregnancy has been legislated by people who will never be pregnant.

Before you come for me in the comments: I am pro-life. I think every child deserves the same right to live, from conception. HOWEVER, what I am absolutely 100% against, and makes me, by definition, pro-choice, is any one — government or otherwise — having any power to regulate my choices. Is my choice morally right? Is my choice morally wrong? Guess what? It doesn’t matter. God gave us FREEWILL. It’s the fundamental right that allows us to choose Him without coercion, without stipulation. If God doesn’t control our choices, allowing us to be autonomous creations, then why should the government get to control them? I inherently believe that every choice should be our own, the consequences are something only we can consider and only we can choose, but they are not something that any other human or government should be able to control. The single most important thing that God did when He created us was give us the opportunity to choose our path. He is the most powerful entity in the universe, and so if He gives us freewill, who does the government think they are to take it from us?

Government regulating women and morality.

“But Moe, that’s just reproductive stuff.” Buckle up, because it’s not.

Turns out the whole “we don’t trust women to know their own bodies” bit is not limited to our uteruses. It’s a whole hosting package.

Ever heard of “Yentl syndrome”? It’s a real, actual, published-in-medical-journals phenomenon where women having heart attacks wait, on average, a full hour longer than men to get treated — because our symptoms get chalked up to anxiety, or stress, or “are you SURE it’s not just a panic attack, sweetie” before anyone takes it seriously enough to run a test. Multiple studies have found that when women report pain, doctors are statistically more likely to hand us a sedative or an antidepressant instead of an actual painkiller — because a woman in pain reads as “hysterical” and a man in pain reads as “legitimate medical emergency.”

This has been proven in my own life. I took my daughter to the ER when she was TWELVE. Yes, you read that correctly, twelve. She had excruciating pain. Turns out it was a cyst on her ovary — its size filled almost the whole ovary. They gave her Tylenol. When I took my son to the ER for stomach pain? They gave him morphine before they even ran a test. Turns out, he needed to… use the restroom. Insert eye roll here.

And if you have an autoimmune disease — which, by the way, women make up 75–80% of all patients — buckle up for an, on average, 4.6 year wait to get correctly diagnosed, and you’ll see an average of four different doctors first, most of whom will tell you it’s stress, it’s anxiety, it’s “you should lose 20 pounds.” Nearly half of these women get told, at some point, that they’re just a “chronic complainer.” Meanwhile your kidneys, or your thyroid, or your joints are quietly falling apart in the background while somebody with a medical degree pats your hand and prescribes Lexapro.

And if you want the most chilling, high-def, in-color example of grown women being declared incapable of managing their own decisions? Britney Spears. Under her conservatorship, she testified in open court that she wanted to get married and have another baby — and her own father and the team managing her wouldn’t let her go to the doctor to remove her IUD. A pop star with a net worth in the hundreds of millions, and she couldn’t make a decision about her own contraception without her dad’s blessing. If it can happen to her, in the brightest spotlight in the world, it is absolutely happening to regular women in regular exam rooms every single day, with nobody watching.

So here’s the through-line, in case anyone’s still wondering what my point is:

It doesn’t matter if it’s a tubal ligation, a c-section, a heart attack, an autoimmune flare, or a literal global pop star’s IUD. The pattern is the same: a woman states clearly what she wants for her own body, and somewhere in the room — a husband, a father, a judge, a doctor who took one look at her and decided she couldn’t possibly know her own mind — someone else’s opinion gets weighted heavier than hers. We call it “policy.” We call it “just being cautious.” We call it “for her own good.” What it actually is, is a very old, very tired assumption that women are basically children who need adult supervision for their own reproductive and medical decisions — dressed up in a white coat and a consent form.

I signed my name on that consent form at 24 years old, after passing two psych evals I never should have needed, with my husband’s signature sitting next to mine like he had any say in what my ovaries were doing. I got my tubal. I’m one of the lucky ones — I got what I wanted, eventually, after jumping through hoops that no man asking for a vasectomy has ever had to jump through.

We’ve been sold this story that the fight for women’s bodily autonomy is over — that we won, that it’s history-book stuff now, that the patriarchy is a vintage problem like corsets and no seatbelts. I’m here to tell you: it just changed its outfit. It’s not always a law anymore. Sometimes it’s a signature line on a form that shouldn’t exist. Sometimes it’s a doctor deciding four years is a reasonable amount of time to leave you undiagnosed. Sometimes it’s a psychiatrist asking you a question so cruel it should be studied in an ethics class on what not to do.

— Moe