Art Works for Change offers virtual walking tours of their exhibitions, as in the above link for Off the Beaten Path (2010) with artist contributions from 26 countries on Women and Violence.  In 2012, this will be extended to a focus on Africa.  A Yoko Ono print is featured in this exhibition along with an interview with her.  Sadly, there are no Canadian artists in the exhibition.  The Missing and Murdered Women associated with the Highway of Tears from Alberta to British Columbia comes to mind but the everyday violence and silencing of women’s voice, which features in this exhibition is the backdrop to the acts of violence that make headlines. 

I did not find any commentary on the title itself — Off the Beaten Path.  Kudos to those who chose this title — and its subtle ironies and double nuances around violence and making the hidden visible.

Crystal Smith’s work on the Achilles Project and the Pixel Project qualifies her as a popular educator, which is the focus of the Woman Making Waves blog.  Her work also illustrates feminist philosopher Sandra Harding’s assertion that gender relations are a central consideration in gender identity. To highlight Crystal Smith as a popular educator, drawing on images and performances from popular culture, I draw your attention to Word Cloud: How Toy Ad Vocabulary Reinforces Gender Stereotypes.  http://www.achilleseffect.com/2011/03/word-cloud-how-toy-ad-vocabulary-reinforces-gender-stereotypes/

Harding, Sandra (1996). Gendered ways of knowing and the “epistemological crisis” of the West.  In N. Goldberger, J. Tarule, B. Clinchy, & M. Belenky (Eds.), Knowledge, difference, and power: Essays inspired by Women’s Ways of Knowing (pp. 431-455). New York: Basic Books.

Crystal Smith is a social media and marketing writer who has spent many years working with non-profit agencies seeking gender equality and an end to discrimination against women. After being regularly disappointed by the film and television offerings available to her two young sons, she decided to write about the impact of kids’ popular culture on young boys.

Crystal is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada.

When not writing or blogging about boys and pop culture, she provides pro bono social media marketing services to the Halton Women’s Centre. She also works as the volunteer Blog Editor for The Pixel Project.

The Toronto Slutwalk is sponsored by the Motherhood Initative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI). See press release below.  I have a hunch that we will witness the “strategies of subversive repetition” that identity theorist Judith Butler (1990) assigns as a way to resist subjugated gender identities.  I invite any slutwalkers to post pics to this blog if they see themselves putting theory into practice.  Here is a bit of the theory:

The task of subversive repetition is “not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, age and ability norms that enable repetition itself” (p. 148). French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s (1984) distinction between strategies and tactics aligns with Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code’s (1991) distinction between knowers and actors. The “space of the tactic is the space of the other. … It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. … It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. … A tactic is an art of the weak” (p. 37). For Toronto popular educator dian marino (1997), operating in the “cracks in consent … [ helps people] organize their rebellions” (p. 130).

ON SUNDAY, APRIL 3rd – MIRCI’s FEMINIST MOTHERS ACTIVIST GROUP WILL BE ATTENDING/MARCHING IN THE TORONTO SLUTWALK.

On January 24, 2011, during an on-campus safety forum held at Osgoode Hall Law School  to discuss recent attacks on women at York University, Toronto Police Const. Michael Sanguinetti explained that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

 He later apologized, saying he was “embarrassed” by his remarks

but it is too late – WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH!

“When we first heard about the Toronto Police officer labeling women and people most at risk of sexual assault as “sluts”, we thought about making noise and demanding for more than an apology. We have a constitutional right to a freedom of expression and a freedom of assembly so we’re using it. Putting that into action, we wanted to go right to Toronto Police Service’s front door at 40 College St. with impassioned numbers uniting against these damaging stereotypes. Thus SlutWalk Toronto was born. We are taking our frustration to the streets – literally.”

Join us for our walk. (taken from the official Slutwalk site):

 http://www.slutwalktoronto.com 

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN JOINING MIRCI/MARCHING WITH US – PLEASE CONTACT  

ANDREA O’REILLY FOR FULL DETAILS: aoreilly@yorku.ca

We look forward to seeing you there! 

MEDIA ABOUT THE EVENT:

 http://www.excal.on.ca/news/cop%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98slut%E2%80%99-comment-draws-backlash-from-guerilla-activists/

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/955682 

 http://www.slutwalktoronto.com/swto-in-the-press

 By Dorothy Lander & John Graham-Pole

 Culture es acción, es hacer, pero un hacer para expresar la idea en la materia.

-  Alfredo Barrera Vásquez, 1965[1]

 “Culture is action” is the epigram for Tara Underliner’s (2004) book, Contemporary Theatre in Mayan Mexico. We translated “action to express ideas in matter” in our embodied performances during our Day in Progreso on the Yucatán peninsula. This was the centerpiece of our Play with Purpose seminar at sea, organized through the Taos Institute (www.taosinstitute.net), the Houston Galveston Institute (www.talkhgi.com), and our hosts, the Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Progreso (ITS) and Kanankil Instituto (www.kanankil.org).

At nine o’clock on Monday morning, February 7, 2011, we stepped off our cruise ship the Carnival Ecstasy onto the Yucatán. In sun-sparkled whites, our ITS and Kanankil hosts greeted us, shared a traditional Maya meal, and invited us to join in singing Michael Jackson’s “Make it a Better Place” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M6y_0VLB54). The thirty women of Yucatán who told George Ann Huck and Jann E. Freed (2010) the stories of their journeys also “were carried forward by their passionate desire for a mundo mejor, a better world.” This passion unfolded time and again in conversation and performance throughout the day in Progreso. We learned from our Kanankil Institute host and organizer, Rocio Chaveste, that kanankil is the Maya word for “conversation.”   

Figure 1:  Singing “Make a Better Place” (ITS, Progreso, February 7, 2011)

Our 5-day Play with Purpose seminar at sea was tied to the itinerary of the cruise ship Carnival Ecstasy. Reminiscent of Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) theories of medieval carnival, even the ship name appeals to excess and possibility, temporary and subversive desire and appetite, self reaching out to other, “I” relating to “We.” From the moment we stepped off the ship onto the port of Progreso, the “democratic, emancipatory and transformative genre of social expression [of modern carnival took over], … a meaningful revelling in the subversion of standard meaning. For a short time life came out of its usual legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom” (Quantz & O’Connor, 1988, pp. 100-101). Carnival legitimates expression of the unthinkable; how apt that we were (dis)embarking on our own utopian freedom on Monday morning, the very day that is so culturally linked to the start of the work week! “Carnival is the dialogue of the streets where laughing folk become con-spirators in understanding something new” (Lander, 2000, p. 236).  Conspiring — breathing together — for just this short time as revelers, we were able to restore the intimacy so often distorted in the everyday officialdom of our professional and academic identities.

Figure 2: John Graham-Pole & Dorothy Lander;  Mary Gergen & Ken Gergen; the Carnival Ecstasy

Carnival expression, especially laughter, collapses “us” and “them,” removing even language barriers. The global reach of Play with Purpose participants included Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Macao, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom.  If you listen to the background hum on the accompanying YouTube video Mundo Mejor: Making a Better World in the Yucatán, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9uuqDeh4HI), you might suspect laughter is our lingua franca.  Bakhtin (1984) conceptualized carnival laugher as victory over all that oppresses and restricts. “Only equals may laugh. If inferiors are permitted to laugh in front of their superiors, and if they cannot suppress their hilarity, this means farewell to respect” (p. 92).

Figure 3: Laughing participants disembark at Progreso

Symbolic of the “I-We” conspiracy were the Ola! greetings and invitations to support the local economy that greeted us from the moment we stepped off the ship into the photo-op embrace of Yucatán performers in Maya dress and onto the (tiá) aunt-niece artisans displaying the embroidered fabrics developed over three generations of a family business. Their signature calla lily design now graces our kitchen table in rural Nova Scotia. We learned that along with traditional fishing, the cruise ships are the mainstay of the economy. 

Figure 4: Calla Lily Tablecloth from the Yucatán in our Nova Scotia Kitchen

In Progreso, participants were invited to create “real time” performances simultaneous with the students, faculty and staff from the Kanankil Instituto and the Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Progreso (ITS), who had been developing their performances for three months.  Building on the seminar-at-sea sub-title —Relational and Performative Practices in Everyday Life — we coordinated 10 simultaneous performances in the ITS courtyard, spanning themes of: community and social change; education and teaching; environment and sustainability; organization/business/work life; therapy/counseling. We were one of three groups on community and social change, and all the Yucatán performers were women. As the performance was without words, I have removed the background sound from the accompanying video (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9uuqDeh4HI).

 Culture as action: these women performed environmental activism; they mimed complacency, taping their eyelids shut; they performed urgency, the clock symbolizing time running out.  They performed struggle, illustrating that no sooner had some members cleaned up the environment, others were adding to the litter. They performed disease, signalling the link between caring for the environment and caring for each other, the “I” relating to the “We.” They performed “hope” and “we’re all in this together,” actually embracing the character of the villain used to symbolize the most flagrant harming of the environment.

 Figure 5:  Community and Environmental Change Practices

As an immediate effect of the performance, we could not in “all conscience” think and act the same about the water bottles and disposable plates and cutlery that subsequently served up our exquisite meal. At the same time, we could appreciate that much of the food we were eating was produced on the Yucatán, using traditional Maya recipes. Sally St. George, the leader for our community group performance, articulated the conflict that we were struggling with: the irony of the huge carbon footprint taken up by the cruise ship that we had chosen to bring us to this place. In carnival mode and surrounded by the very body of water that was still reverberating from the effects of the 2010 BP Deep Horizon oil spill, which flowed for three months before it was capped, we could not so readily distance the “I” from the “We.” We had to make meaning differently.   

Through the deft translation of our group facilitator Victor, both performers and audience were able to share insights.  The leadership of women in the environmental movement was a strong theme.  In the spirit of carnival, we couldn’t tell faculty, students, and administrators apart. Administrator Lesley was wearing the traditional Mayan embroidered dress (huipil)[2]. In the performance of community change, they were equals. A recurring theme was our shared experience that children often take the lead on environmental change in their families. 

Just as we were moving into a discussion about the role of political leadership in community and environmental change, as if on cue the Mayor of Progreso appeared.  In this picture, Ms. Maria Esther Alonzo Morales underscores the leadership of women in the environmental movement, holding up two fingers — dos — to point out there were only two men in our group. In the accompanying video, you will not need a translation for the Mayor repeated appeals to “esperanza.”

Figure 6: Mayor of Progreso, Ms. Maria Esther Alonzo Morales, joins our conversation  

Back in our snowbound home in rural Nova Scotia and sitting at our embroidered calla lily kitchen table, we took time to reflect on the insights and meaning-making that can only happen in carnival space and time. In keeping with our guiding research methodology of appreciative genealogy (see Dorothy’s research blog: www.womenmakingwaves.wordpress.com), we wanted to put these new meanings into historical context.  What was the history of Maya women’s role in social transformations embedded in the dominant discourse that constructs their identities as guardians and defenders of tradition? Kathleen Rock Martin (2007) in her book on Maya poet and politician Araceli Cab Cumi reveals the long history of women’s political activism in the Yucatán — the site of Mexico’s first feminist congresses (1916) and the first Mexican state in which women held public office (1922). This day we met many more “organic intellectuals”: Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci introduced this phrase in the 20th century to identify thinkers and organizers within an emerging social group who communicate — perform — the world view to those outside it. From the perspective of contemporary feminist theory, it is easy for historians to dismiss this first feminist congress in 1916 for its “lack of sophistication, the ignorance of social theory, the confusion of ideas, and its mild mawkishness” (Foppa, 1979, p. 193); however, this discounts the symbolic and strategic power that this recognition of the first instance of organized feminism in Mexico carries.  

What is the history of the Yucatán in the environmental movement? Whereas engineering and technology and the environmental sciences are dominated by male students and faculty in North America, women were the strongest presence at ITS, under the leadership of Direccion General, Lila Rosa Frias Castillo. Esther who dramatically performed “environmental sickness” in our group was an ITS engineering student. Lila’s farewell remarks to us collapsed family, community and professional identity, as she cited the wise words of her 90-year old father about the importance of “humbleness” in her academic and community leadership. Lila performed a poignant reminder that our best leaders marry the soft and hard sciences.

The Yucatán Living website offers a fitting close to our carnival reflections on culture as environmental action (http://www.yucatanliving.com/news/sisal-progreso-and-tixkokob.htm). Although feminist historians dismiss the 1916 feminist congress in Mexico for its antifeminist tone, especially its call for “male rather than female education,” (Foppa, 1979, p. 193), our partication in the women-led performance of environmental activism at Progreso leads us to conclude that quite the reverse has emerged into the 21st century, including this community exemplar of conserving the mangrove habitat in Progreso.

For years, the mangroves in Progreso have served as little more than a dumping ground for everything from old bed springs to bags of regular garbage. But no more! Several weeks ago, a group of students from the Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Progreso, accompanied by members of the IX Naval Zone, visited the mangroves in search of black mangrove seeds. Those are the ones that grow up to have those exotic looking air roots that are so great for holding down erosion. The collecting of these seeds is part of our new reforestation program, in which mangroves figure prominently. However, upon arriving in the mangroves at Progreso, the students and naval personnel were shocked at the amount of trash found there – enough to seriously damage the entire ecosystem of the area. So they set about to clean it up as part of the Navy’s Ecological Saturdays project in Progreso. Fifteen students from the Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Progreso and 30 members of the Navy spent an entire day cleaning in the mangroves and removed hundreds of kilos of trash. As the trash went away, it was not lost on anyone that this area is quite capable of becoming a tourist attraction. Mangroves provide habitat for such a diverse population of animal and plant life that is would be the height of foolishness to ignore this very special treasure that has been right here in Progreso all along.

 Figure 7: The Mangroves of Progreso

In the carnival atmosphere that we experienced on the Yucatán, organic intellectuals are a committed and eloquent presence.

 Works Cited:

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Rabelais and his world (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Foppa, Alaide (1979). The first feminist congress in Mexico, 1916. Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(1), 192-199.

Huck, George Ann, & Freed, Jann E. (2010). Women of Yucatán: Thirty who dare to change their world. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing.

Kintz, Ellen R. (1998). The Yucatec Maya frontier and Maya women: Tenacity of tradition and tragedy of transformation. Sex Roles, 39(7/8), 589-601.

Lander, Dorothy (1999).  Telling transgression: A bridge between contract and carnival in making student services policy. Journal of Education Policy, 14(6), 587-603.

Martin, Kathleen Rock (2007). Discarded pages: Araceli Cab Cumi, Maya poet and politician. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Quantz, R., & O’Connor, T. (1988). Writing critical ethnography: Dialogue, multivoicedness, and carnival in cultural texts. Educational Theory, 38(1), 95-109.

[This is the final post where I share the content of my recent zine, "Ask me about my tubal ligation", published by EXILE Press in February 2010. To read the 1st post, click here. To order a copy, feel free to visit exilebooks.org, microcosmpublishing.com, or akpress.org (coming soon). Thanks for your interest  :) ]

“Our” Tubal Ligation

by Matt McLennan

I’ve been Sarah’s partner since early 2008. I’m a biological male, hetero-flexible in my sexual orientation, masculine in my gender presentation. I’m an intellectual type and a feminist, but I also embody a number of traditionally masculine attitudes and ways of being. In this sense, though generally happy with who I am, I’m constantly finding occasions to learn to be a better feminist. To Sarah’s gender-queer presentation and lifestyle, I present something of a bland counterpart. When she brought me home to meet her family, I think they were some mixture of relieved (because she wasn’t, it appeared to them, a lesbian after all), confused (why would a normal looking young man go for a boyish rebel type?) and disappointed (because their reading of her had been at least partly wrong). In any case, they welcomed me with open arms and have expressed gratitude for the fact that, however it happens, I bring Sarah a measure of happiness.

My opinion on the question of tubal ligation is that if we take women’s reproductive autonomy seriously, then this includes the choice of women not to reproduce. It’s that simple. People routinely choose to get pregnant. If they have healthy networks of social support, their decision is almost always praised, or at least supported, inasmuch as having one’s own children is a defining life choice. That the decision to be childless, on the other hand, is often viewed negatively within the very same support networks or society at large is, therefore, irrational. Unless, that is, we assume that women have an ultimate natural function, that they are biological machines for making babies— and that, therefore, a woman who does not fulfill her “natural” role isn’t a proper woman. This kind of attitude, however, is long overdue for the shit heap. The claim of something’s being “natural” always requires qualification, and in any case does not help us to answer our moral questions, including those surrounding reproduction. A woman is a “failure” at being a woman, if it is ever appropriate to say such a thing, only if she has failed to achieve her most important morally appropriate life goals—and these may or may not include the goal of having children. A woman is not a failure simply by virtue of being childless, as many people tacitly or unabashedly assume.

With respect to Sarah’s decision, many friends, family and acquaintances have asked me questions like “What do you think about her doing it?” or “How do you feel about it?” These are fair questions, but only if the people asking them recognize the proper scope of a partner’s role in any relationship. In my opinion a man does not have, nor should he have, veto power over his partner’s (or any woman’s) morally appropriate life-defining decisions; at best, he should be able to give his opinions, but only in the spirit of communication, concern and compromise—never coercion. I went into my relationship with Sarah knowing full well that she did not want to bear children, and that she was actively pursuing sterilization as a means of ensuring that this didn’t happen. This was, in fact, the subject of a very early conversation we had had as friends. It therefore seems fair to me that I should have had no say in her decision (though she was concerned and caring enough to sound out my thoughts and feelings). It irks me when I get flak from people who learned about her procedure after the fact, and who imply that I should have stopped her somehow. Regardless of what I thought about it, it would have been unfair of me to have tried to change her mind as regards such a life-defining matter—especially, but not solely, since she had thought about it for years, and in any case I knew what I was getting into. If having children was so important to me, I could have looked elsewhere for companionship. But what if I hadn’t known Sarah’s preferences beforehand, or if, rather, she had decided during our relationship that sterilization was what she wanted? There again, morally speaking I would have had to defer to her decision as regards her reproductive autonomy. Perhaps in such a scenario there would be grounds for ending our relationship due to conflicting life goals; ultimately, however, Sarah’s bodily integrity and her unconstrained ability to posit and achieve her own morally appropriate life goals is a greater good than even our relationship.

Many people have emphasized to me that Sarah’s decision is “irreversible”—what if she changes her mind? For that matter, I’m fine with it now, but what if I change my mind? Well, it’s important to note that having a child is also irreversible—once you’ve had it, you can’t take that back, and you must live with the consequences. I doubt, however, that doctors give this kind of stern warning to people trying to conceive. It doesn’t strike me that there is any big risk of Sarah changing her mind; besides, any important life choice we make is fraught with the danger that we’ll change our minds, but we still have to live our lives in the (morally appropriate) ways we think will be most conducive to our happiness. As for me, at this point in my life I do not want children. At some point I might, and Sarah and I have discussed this possibility. Perhaps she’d be amenable to adopting or foster parenting; perhaps an arrangement could be made in which I had a child who is biologically related to me with another woman, and we would all raise the child outside traditional understandings of kinship; perhaps, finally, this change of attitude would be a sticking point that would necessitate the end of our relationship. We can’t tell ahead of time, but then no relationship can be protected against all the unforeseen circumstances life throws in its way.

Finally, I should mention that sterilization is a less complicated procedure and easier to recover from when it is done to a man. This makes male sterilization a better option for couples who don’t want to conceive. Some people have suggested to me that, for this reason, I should have been the one in our relationship to be sterilized. To the extent that my own goals and preferences have been understood by these people, their argument is highly objectionable. Since I have at no time made the decision not to have children biologically related to me—rather, I have made the decision to have a woman who will not bear children as my companion—it amounts to their saying that Sarah’s decision not to bear children entails a duty on my part to restrict my reproductive autonomy. But Sarah and I are not one entity, not a “couple who doesn’t want to conceive”; rather, we’re two individuals, with our own ideas on having children, who are a couple. The argument that I should have been the one to be sterilized doesn’t stand up, because if we are to take women’s reproductive autonomy seriously, then it is not obvious to me how we can fail to accord equal respect to men’s reproductive autonomy.

So there you have it. In my opinion, Sarah’s reproductive autonomy includes her right not to reproduce; but morally speaking, it does not entail any limiting of my own reproductive freedom. Strange as this attitude may sound to some people, so far it has not made for a bad or unstable relationship; far from it. Though I feel that morally speaking, I should not have had any say in her decision, it’s a testament to Sarah’s goodness and loving character that in the spirit of communication and mutual respect she nonetheless actively sought my thoughts and feelings on the matter. It’s this kind of relationship that’s important to me, irrespective of whether or not it produces offspring— biologically related to me or otherwise.

Resources & Good Reads

Books:

Some good books that address various themes touched upon by this zine.

Motherhood & Feminism, by Amber E. Kinser

Yes Means Yes! Visions of female sexual power & a world without rape, edited by Jaclyn Friedman & Jessica Valenti

Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, by Andrea Smith

Color of Violence: The INCITE! anthology, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

Zine:

Vasectomy Party, by Benji Rouse, available online at http://seattlediy.com/zines/vasectomyparty.pdf I think of this as a sort of “companion” zine to mine, although it was made before and entirely independently from mine.

Distros:

Some of my favourite sources for radical literature on a wide range of topics.

AK Press – Best radical press and distro this side of the atlantic. http://akpress.org/

Seal Press – Feminist press with a few real treasures. http://www.sealpress.com/

Microcosm Publishing – Best zine distro in North America! http://microcosmpublishing.com/

[This is the 5th of 6 posts where I share the content of my recent zine, "Ask me about my tubal ligation", published by EXILE Press in February 2010. To read the 1st post, click here. To order a copy, feel free to visit exilebooks.org, microcosmpublishing.com, or akpress.org (coming soon). Thanks for your interest  :) ]

Part 4: Building a Better World

So far I have described many reasons not to have kids. When I get into such conversations, my collocutors sometimes think I must be self-centred, anti-baby, anti-parent, anti-family, or something else along those lines. I’ve thought about this long and hard and realized that the reality is actually quite the opposite! In this section, I describe some of the things people who are committed to building a better world can do if/when their time is not filled with rearing their own biological children. I think a lot of these things play a direct role in making the world a better place for families, and so should not be considered divorced from family-friendly values.

I see my future as more aligned with a solidarity model of caregiving and family. Since I don’t desire biological kids I choose to not have any, thereby freeing up time and energy to adopt or foster someone else’s kids if I want to someday, and/or to generally support my friends and family members who do or will have kids of their own. Energy is finite. Think about it: if every human devotes their time and energy to raising one or more additional humans on a full-time basis, the finite energy that exists gets spread very thinly over a lot of kids (notice that I am not speaking of love as finite, only emotional and attentional energy). If we have fewer people having fewer kids to raise, that frees up more of this adult energy to be devoted to each child. Imagine if there were dozens of people caring together in different and similar ways for only a handful of kids! Think of all the benefits the kids would get from being exposed to so many different people who have time and energy to give to them. And think of how much easier it would be on the parents, since they can then channel their own energy in more diverse ways and also have some time for themselves. I’m not talking about daycare but about a community model of family-raising, or an “intentional care community”. I think this is part of what it means for a village to raise a child. By making myself permanently unable to bring more babies into the world, I’m thereby freeing up a little bit of this attentional and emotional energy for someone else’s babies, or for other adults who need care, however I choose to do so.

I mentioned earlier that for parents today, all the options are bad. Whether it involves, medical care, food choices, schooling options, etc., I firmly believe we need more people devoting themselves to making the world better, not to making it more crowded and more resource-deprived. All the money, time, space, and emotional energy that it takes to raise humans from birth to adulthood could be better spent challenging pharmaceutical companies, industrial agriculture, standardized education, patriarchal and paternalistic medical institutions, and other problems. More importantly, it could be spent building alternative institutions (health, food, education, family) to replace those that have failed us so significantly, to start building the better world we want.

For example, I would much rather devote my energy to a small-scale, inner-city organic farm project that grows food using sustainable practices and makes it available to the local community at affordable prices. Similarly, I would much rather work for a labour union and fight for more holidays, a shorter workday and workweek, better pay and family health benefits, and more and better caregiver-related leaves. Better yet, I’d like to work in a collectively organized workplace that recognizes caregiver responsibilities and whose first priority is to create a supportive environment for workers who are also caregivers. Even more, I’d like to fight for a more inclusive definition of what “family” means so that non-traditional families and care networks receive the support they need. This could create a great workplace model to share with others and hopefully inspire new ones. In other words, I would rather help to make the choices easier for the existing families in my community, rather than start a new family. My priority is not to single out families in particular, but to enthusiastically include them rather than make them the exception. That’s where I want my energy to go, and I think that if the people who became parents by accident or for the wrong reasons were to do so as well (rather than have accidental children), we would have a world much friendlier to those people who truly want to raise children. This is not about criticizing people’s past decisions; this is about prefiguring and preparing for a different future.

Finally, I want to expand how we understand the idea of “the family”. The queer community has been doing this for decades, and I think it’s worth repeating here.

We should not rely on people to care for us purely based on a sense of abstract obligation or debt. The people who give us life, insofar as this was a conscious and intentional decision, should care for us by providing us with the tools needed to eventually get by on our own (or by finding someone else who can), but we should not have to care for our parents simply because they gave birth to us and raised us for many years. Similarly, we should not expect such care from our own kids. If we are going to care for anyone, it should be based on an intentional relationship of caring, because we truly value someone and want the best for them, right into old age.

Some people know early on that they are unable to depend on their family’s care, and need to forge alternative relationships and communities to play this role. Conversely, some people take for granted that their families will feel obligated to care for them, for better or for worse, and see this as a free pass to treat them poorly. Perhaps some people would make a better effort at being kind and respectful to one another if they knew their own well-being depended on it. The solidarity model does require a degree of selfishness: you want the best for other people because you see your own happiness as being bound up with theirs. This is ultimately a constructive form of selfishness, I think.

The nuclear family is a fairly recent historical and social phenomenon and, thankfully, appears to be in decline. Good riddance! I don’t know why people are so attached to it, except out of habit, or why even some queer people are determined to reproduce those models but with slightly different characters. Blood and law are pretty arbitrary factors in determining who people will spend their lives with and devote their energy to! Why can’t “family” be made up of friends who care about one another because they like and love one another based on common values and interests, not because they feel obligated to?

I prefer to think of “intentional care communities” rather than “families” as the primary social unit of a better world. Intentional care communities would be spaces where people come together with a commitment to care for one another, rather than the small isolated households or networks where people are connected by blood or law.

[part 6 coming soon]

Posted by Dorothy Lander 

Image Source: Fun with Dick and Jane: A Commemorative Collection of Stories (San Franciso: Collins Publishers, 1996) 

The story “A Doll for Jane” from the 1950s reader concludes a sequence in which Father, Mother, and the postman all deliver a wished-for doll to Jane on her birthday. 

If you grew up in North America between the 1950s and 1970s, you may very well have learned to read from Dick and Jane readers.
And if you were an elementary school teacher, did you use these readers to help children learn to read? 

Dorothy met Texan-born multi-disciplinary artist Bonnie Baxter, who has had a studio in Val-David, Québec since 1972, when she was seeking artist-participants for the Montreal Whistlestop in 2009. As Dick and Jane were Dorothy’s introduction to learning to read in the 1950s, Dorothy was interested in Bonnie Baxter’s series Jane’s Journey, which Bonnie acknowledges has become “every Jane” but came out of the imagery of those early childhood readers. Bonnie wasn’t able to come to the Montreal Whistlestop but we have been sharing our “every Jane” experiences ever since.  Visit Bonnie’s home page to see some of the images of Jane’s Journey: www.bonniebaxter.com 

As Christine Unger writes in the catalogue introduction to Bonnie Baxter’s series Jane’s Journey, it was: 

engendered by a renewed connection with the imagery of the Dick and Jane series of early childhood readers. So many of us learned our first lessons from Dick and Jane readers, readers that taught us our place in the world in the simplest, most redundant language possible. In brightly colored, hypnotic repetition, the world-view of Dick and Jane’s America was imprinted onto our psyches more convincingly, more ineradicably, than any religious doctrine. The perfect suburban family unit, Mother, Father, Dick and Jane and Spot, in a perfect paternal hierarchy ensconced in the perfect little white picket fenced household. The great dumbing/numbing down of America (in which I include Canada) held sway from the 1930s to the mid-70s. 

Bonnie Baxter’s exhibitions to date include: 

Jane aux jardin delices, Centre cultural, Val-David, Quebec 

L’Amerique de Jane, Division Gallery, Montréal 

Jane’s Journey, University of Sherbrooke Gallery 

Paris Texas, Angell gallery, Toronto 

China Jane, TBA 

Jane’s Journey 

The next catalogue in Jane’s Journey will be in Toronto from Jan 20 to Feb 26, 2011 and this is where you come in.
The first two catalogues represented different chapters and locations in Jane’s Journey.
(Val-David, America,The Journey, Paris, Texas, China).
Bonnie would like to vary the texture of this upcoming catalogue by adding reminiscences and reflections of Dick and Jane
readers — like YOU! 

If you choose to contribute to Bonnie Baxter’s Toronto exhibition of Jane’s Journey with your reminiscences and reflections
as reader and/or teacher — supported by images, drawing, poetic expressions — please respond to this posting in the COMMENT
field and/or send your contributions directly to Dorothy Lander. Dorothy will compose an interweave of Dick and Jane readers’
and teachers’ responses for Bonnie’s Toronto exhibition, drawn from all the responses (dorothy.lander@ns.sympatico.ca).
As a guide, I insert an overview of Bonnie’s project, again drawn from Christine Unger’s catalogue introduction: 

Other artists have taken on the subject of ‘Jane’ exposing her sexist representation and the pervasive bureaucratic and authoritarian impositions she excuses. Bonnie’s ‘Jane’ has moved far beyond a simple gendered reaction to a childhood reader. ‘Jane’ is on a journey. Jane’s Journey rings like an echo at the back of the head, a thought you can’t quite formulate, an idea that sits at the tip of your tongue and then … There is no simple statement here about gender and identity. Life is layered and complex and defies our expectations—it is by definition, a symptom of change. The definition of ‘Jane’, is a living one, something new for every generation and every individual. 

In his poem First Reader recent US poet laureate Billy Collins tells us that Dick and Jane were “the boy and girl who began fiction” for him.  Were Dick and Jane your first experience of fiction?  The last line of Collins’ poem is: “We were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.” How does this resonate with your experience?  (in Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems; Random House, 2002) 

As a testing ground for this global invitation, I asked my older sister June for her reminiscences and reflections. And in order not to explicitly invite responses focused on the sexist, racist, classist and other ideological representations, I also asked her if there were any positive values from the Dick and Jane readers that she could identify.  Here is June’s immediate email response, which I include as a pointer to any positive traces that you too recall as a Dick and Jane reader and/or teacher. 

I remember my first day at school and being given my Dick and Jane book and being introduced to Dick — picture on the first page with his name under it.  That was probably my only lesson that day in an 8-grade school.  There was a positive lesson in the book:  Sally was the baby but she was the only one in the family who could get under a chair. 

I suppose now a book with a family with a mother and a father and 3 children all in the same house wouldn’t be considered positive?  I know Sally was blond and cute but I thought Jane had brown hair. 

I barely remember Sally though the non-humans Spot and Puff are quite vivid. Perhaps kindness to animals and the benefits of living with other species would be the positive values that I would take from my earliest reading experience in a school setting.  And I would have to say my lifelong love of reading began with Dick and Jane, alongside my lifelong love of dolls and fascination with representations of girls and and women.
I hope to hear from you (dorothy.lander@ns.sympatico.ca). 

Please do add any more famous Janes to Christine Unger’s list below.  I’ll begin by adding Janey Canuck, the heroine in Emily Murphy’s 1910 novels, which popularized Canuck as slang for Canadian, and along with her author became iconic of Canadian women being named as Persons (see Jennifer Henderson, Topia, 2005, “How Janey Canuck Became a Person”: http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/article/viewFile/440/12257). 

Janey Canuck, pen name for Emily Murphy 

Courtesy of National Library of Canada 

____________
The State of “Jane” 

by Christine Unger 

Jane, Jane, sweet baby Jane, Lady Jane Grey, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Calamity Jane, Dick and Jane, Tarzan’s Jane, Jane Seymour (3rd wife of King Henry the VIII), Jane Seymour the actress, Jane Wyman, Jane Russell, Jayne Mansfield, Jane Goodall, Jane Fonda, Plain Jane and of course, Jane Doe — there is probably no other name in western culture that resonates so thoroughly through the female psyche even though, or maybe because, it’s popularity has suffered a steady drop since the early 1960s. 

Jane’s Journey traces a parallel autobiography of Bonnie Baxter herself. Bonnie steps outside of herself and slightly to one side. Using herself as a model with her partner Michel Beaudry behind the camera, Bonnie allows ‘Jane’ to revisit her private geography-the homes and roads of her past, from Texas where she grew up as a child, to France and Italy where she broke open her American blinders, to California (her mother’s final home), and Val-David, Québec where she renews and recreates herself on a daily basis. The powerful imagery of Jane is both highly personal and profoundly embracing of the human condition. It questions the basis of our individuality, but it refuses to entirely reject our need for conformity. Jane’s Journey accepts the contradictory nature of life: the absurd and the beautiful, the tragic and ironic, the private and public, all coexist in a synchronous whole. The most common flower – the plainest Jane – is a unique individual when she travels, when she looks out into the world and asks the question, “who am I?”, and the view of the world itself re-emerges in brighter colours and stronger relief. 

Jane’s averted gaze and that inescapable wig of blond ‘Jane-ness’ give her anonymity and emphasize the severe and edgy psychodrama of her surroundings. Her lonely figure perches at the edge of the unknown—just beyond lie the outer-limits of a surreal and inexplicably unpopulated landscape. Her incongruous presence creates an uncomfortable tension, a forlorn expectation. In Jane’s travels, her strangely artificial-self is the central character in sequence of scenes that feel hauntingly familiar: a postcard image, a movie still, an illustration from a book.  Yet, in every instance she is inexplicably alone and that vague familiarity only serves to emphasize the iconic nature of her presence and tickle our sense of memory with a feeling of déjà vu. 

There is, sometimes, one other presence, though not a human one. In earlier series, Bonnie, incorporated the presence of a small toy Chihuahua she calls chi-chi-doggie into her work. The Chi-chi doggie played the role of trickster or shamanic guide in Bonnie’s process. In Jane’s Journey, a great wolfhound, Bonnie’s true-life canine companion, Lupe, often accompanies Jane. Her larger than life, yet oh-so-gentle demeanor and stance, suggest that the scenes we are witnessing are somehow supernatural, a place as much a part of the past or the future as of a captured-present. Her mute existence acts as benevolent spirit rather than guide or talisman: a constant but temperate reminder that the limits of nature always stand guard at the edges of imagination. 

Jane/Bonnie wanders in the idyllic hills of Italy—visiting old homes and old haunts, she looks out at the wondrous manmade achievement of the Eiffel Tower, locates herself on Highway 66, rests at the edge of the grand canyon (no country for old women), visits a parental home bathed in the hip, hard light of Mulholland Drive-like, California suburbs; she sits at the edge of a great ocean, solitary but for circling birds; stands queen like at the edge of a Narnia-esque winter landscape… Everywhere Jane/Bonnie goes, she seems to ask, what is me and what is “she”. 

The imagery of Jane’s Journey has a fairytale resonance-simultaneously rich with irony and humor in its individualistic detail and starkly archetypal in its anonymity. It’s compositional subtext of geometric supremacy saturated in the colour schemes of a de Chirico or Diebenkorn, supply these oddly depopulated travel-scapes, with eerie significance. They transcend ‘Jane’ and reach toward ‘Jainism’ searching for spiritual independence, for a state of equanimity. Bonnie Baxter’s ‘Jane’ hovers dramatically and poignantly between the requirements of the present and the desire for eternity.

[This is the 4th of 6 posts where I share the content of my recent zine, "Ask me about my tubal ligation", published by EXILE Press in February 2010. To read the 1st post, click here. To order a copy, feel free to visit exilebooks.org, microcosmpublishing.com, or akpress.org (coming soon). Thanks for your interest  :) ]

Part 3: Baby-Making Machines

To be very clear: I believe it is essential to inform patients of the possible risks and repercussions of all medical decisions. But to be condescending and patronizing about it is a whole other issue that smacks of sexism and paternalism—which is unacceptable.

Generally, I’ve tried to be very open about my surgery, using it as an opening to educate about reproductive freedom. Sometimes, though, people say the most ridiculous things. Here are some real things that various people, including my doctors, have said to me upon learning that I wanted and/or underwent a tubal ligation:

• You’ll still need to use condoms to protect yourself from STIs. No kidding. This comment suggests that I don’t understand what I’m asking for, and it further suggests that all I’m looking for is a quick-fix for condom-free sex. That’s obviously a bonus, under the right circumstances, but it’s certainly not the primary reason.

• You’re too young. So I’m old enough to ovulate, to have sex, and to produce unwanted offspring or terminate a pregnancy. I’m old enough to drink. I’m old enough to drive. I’m old enough to carry a firearm. Essentially they’re saying I’m old enough to create a life, to ruin someone’s life, and to end someone’s life, but I’m not able to permanently “opt out” of reproduction altogether? We don’t require people to obtain licenses before becoming parents—a pretty big undertaking, if you ask me—and we refuse them the right to not produce unwanted offspring. We can have children at any age, even if we don’t want them, even if we’re ill-equipped to raise and care for them, even if we’re likely to neglect them, but to refuse to have children we have to reach some arbitrary minimum age. How does no one else see the paradox here???

• You don’t have any kids yet. Right, and I intend to stay that way. Having kids would defeat the entire purpose of not having kids, don’t you think? This argument suggests that it’s only legitimate to refuse children after you’ve fulfilled your womanly duty to bear a few. Even then, I have friends who’ve had unwanted children and are still being refused the surgery because of their young age.

• You’ll change your mind. This claim has many variations: You’ll regret it later, Your mothering instinct just hasn’t kicked in yet, What if you meet Mr. Right?, You don’t know what you’ll want in 10 years, etc. To be clear: I don’t love kids, I’m not especially attached to my genes, and the idea of carrying a fetus and giving birth repulses me. Aside from all this, the statement suggests that women as a group are so flighty, trendy, fickle, changeable, irrational, etc, that we cannot commit to any decision. Of course I might change my mind. Everyone changes their mind sometimes. If I want children badly enough someday, I’ll adopt some or figure out another way to have them in my life. Similarly, no one questions a woman’s decision to get pregnant and bring a new human life into the world, which she now has to take care of for the rest of her life. Of course, that’s what women should want to do, right? Once it’s born, though, you then have to take care of it for a large part of the remainder of your own life. You can’t change your mind now—while I still can. In spite of this, intentionally sterilized women are questioned, challenged, and alienated, while pregnant women are mostly congratulated.

• This is a really big decision; once you do this you can’t take it back. Another variation: A tubal ligation is permanent and non-reversible. I know. So is having a baby. When a pregnant woman comes in for her ultrasound, or when she’s lying on the delivery table, do you ask her, “Are you sure you want to do this?” These statements suggest that having a baby is “natural” and isn’t a big deal, but that not having babies is somehow life-changing and something I might later regret because, by virtue of being born female, I must be hardwired to have some. We’re so afraid to acknowledge that parents sometimes regret having their own kids.

• What does your husband/boyfriend think about all this? Why does that even matter? It’s my body; why do I need his permission? When I didn’t have a partner I was denied the surgery, and when I did have one they wanted his approval. Questions like this one (when used as a challenge rather than sincerely trying to understand) are not benign. There are several assumptions here: If you don’t have a long-term, monogamous, male partner, then you should not be seeking such a form of contraception (i.e. “sluts” deserve what they get, while people in relationships are more responsible and deserve peace of mind). If you do have such a partner, then it is assumed he should have a say because, as a woman, you are clearly unable to make important decisions for yourself. Both times, I was trying to make the most responsible decision for myself, but the doctors treated me like I was actually being irresponsible (i.e. looking for a quick-fix way to fuck a lot without using condoms—which, I should add, is also a perfectly legitimate reason for seeking the surgery and not irresponsible at all).

Some of the most ridiculous stuff isn’t even deserving of a response, but I’ll try anyway:

• Aren’t you curious to know what your child(ren) would look like? Sure, but that’s not a good enough reason to have any.

• Who will take care of you when you’re old? I’m sure I/we will figure it out. There are innumerable examples of families where the kids neglect their own parents in their old age, so why should I produce children solely for that purpose? Besides, as long our definitions of “family” remain that narrow, we will never be able to visualize what alternative care arrangements can look like.

• Aren’t you afraid of being lonely? I actually like being left alone; besides, that’s still not a good enough reason to make more humans. I recently read that many women actually feel more lonely after they have kids, rather than less so.

• You owe me grandchildren! A variation of this: I brought you into this world, so you owe me. Last time I checked, you brought me into this world. I believe you thus owe me the tools to get along in it on my own. Taking care of me and giving me love and support isn’t a favour, it’s the bare minimum that intentional parents and families should be expected to give their kids. That’s the most that either of us owes the other based on the nature of this relationship.

In case it isn’t clear yet, I believe all of this is part of a larger pattern of challenging a woman’s ability to make big decisions about herself, her life, and her body if the results of those decisions aren’t thought biologically pre-determined (in other words, if the decisions aren’t already made for her).

Some of the things we don’t think about enough include why we should perhaps not have kids. That’s precisely what I will briefly discuss next: various reasons for all kinds of “family planning,” whether it’s wanting only one or two kids, or wanting kids but not right now, or not wanting any at all.

I want to be clear that I am not condemning the decision to have children when this is a decision that was made due to real desire and not due to indifference, social pressure, “moral” obligation, or for superficial reasons. In light of the societal attitudes that are hostile to women who do not want to have children—and particularly to women who choose to terminate unintended pregnancies—I am trying to explain why someone (i.e. me) might not want to have any, and why someone who does want a child or children might want more control over how, when, where, and why they have them.

Bad options

Most of the time, the idea of having kids has terrified me. I have never wanted to get pregnant, go through labour, deal with screaming babies and dirty diapers, pump tons of money into baby supplies, toys, daycares, schools, and everything else that comes with having kids. I don’t want to worry about maybe someday becoming a single parent (either by choice or by accident). I don’t want to have to decide between risking the kids’ health with illness or risking their health with unsafe, inadequately-tested vaccines; whether to put them in underfunded daycare programs just so I can live a semi-independent life; whether to send them to mind- numbing, creativity-stifling public or private schools or create a time-, energy-, and freedom-consuming series of home-schooling programs; whether to feed them only organic, vegan food (which is quite expensive) or affordable but nutritionally-questionable crap; whether to stay in a failing relationship “for the kids” or struggle as a single-parent; the list goes on. These are really hard decisions to make. In a world where all the options are bad, how can anyone want to raise kids here, at this historical moment?

Of course, not everyone sees the world this way, and many of those who do still want to raise families here and now in spite of the difficulty. I don’t understand this desire, but that doesn’t make it wrong. I respect some people’s decisions to be parents, while fully recognizing that this path is not for me.

The wrong reasons

There are some people’s decisions, however, that I cannot respect as easily. Our world does not need nearly as many children as we are currently producing, and many of them are born to people who don’t want them, or who don’t want them right now. Some kids spend most of their lives being cared for by nannies and/or daycares; some spend their youth in boarding schools; some are born to parents who care more about their careers than about raising their kids; some have to work at a very young age because their families cannot support them; some are abused, whether sexually, physically, emotionally, or in other ways; some are neglected, underfed, or otherwise mistreated by selfish, ignorant, irresponsible, and/or emotionally-unavailable parents; some are given up for adoption; some are orphaned in various ways; others wind up in foster care; some are abandoned or murdered by their parents; and some children have to deal with more than one of these problems. Clearly, none of these settings is ideal. I don’t want to make this about people being “good” or “bad” parents, because I think a lot of it is systemic and has to do with involuntary parenthood, inadequate support for the people who do choose to become parents, and choosing to become a parent for the wrong reasons.

Involuntary parenthood is a pet peeve of mine. If women had more control over their reproduction—and by this I mean access to accurate information, to support, to a wide variety of safe and healthy contraception options, and to safe and healthy abortion care, as well as having a mind free from patriarchal and religious moral control—I think the incidence of involuntary parenthood would drop significantly.

We also need to better support people who are already parents, and to better support the kids who are already born and who need loving families and communities. Aside from the obvious benefits of affordable and accessible childcare and of universal healthcare, we need to create a world that is overall more parent- and child-friendly. A friend and I were recently discussing a feminist bookstore that had a sign in the window reserving the right to force out people whose kids were being too loud. While I certainly agree that kids can be loud and frustrating, being loud is what kids do. Kids are loud. Babies cry. And a feminist bookstore, of all places, should understand that. If we’re really hoping and struggling for a better world where parents have the same freedoms as everyone else, we need to start building these family-friendly spaces right here and now.

On that same note, there are already so many babies and children in the world who do not have families. If we are truly fighting for a better world for everyone, including them, then one way to do it is to adopt rather than have biological children. Another way is to provide a healthy foster home for kids whose birth families have died or somehow failed them. People always say that parenting is a “selfless act,” but I disagree. Many people have babies because they don’t want to grow old alone. Others do it because they want to know what their baby might look like. There are already so many kids in the world who do not have families to care for them, we really do not need more of them; we need loving homes and communities for those who are already here.

[click here for part 5 of 6]

[This is the 3rd of 6 posts where I share the content of my recent zine, "Ask me about my tubal ligation", published by EXILE Press in February 2010. To read the 1st post, click here. To order a copy, feel free to visit exilebooks.org, microcosmpublishing.com, or akpress.org (coming soon). Thanks for your interest  :) ]

Part 2: The Doctors

My family doctor

I was 24 by this time, and I made an appointment to see my family doctor to discuss contraception options. I was very nervous and embarrassed to be in there because it was the first time I had to acknowledge, for the record, that sex was now a part of my life. It was terrifying. I was so afraid of being judged, which I now recognize as ridiculous. I also just didn’t like my doctor very much, and hated talking to her about things that were sensitive or important to me. She never seemed to take me seriously; this visit was no exception.

Going in, I knew what I wanted. People had been telling me for a long time that I would never find a doctor who would perform the surgery on “someone so young,” so I knew it was going to be an uphill battle. Knowing nothing about how elective surgeries worked, I assumed there was a long waiting list and figured the process would probably take a few years so I should get started right away. I was determined to get this done, somehow.

I told the doctor I had no interest in having children, ever, and now that I was sexually active with men I wanted contraception. I told her that I had felt this way for a long time, and that I wanted permanent contraception; I wanted information about getting a tubal ligation. I don’t remember the details of our conversation very well, but I recall her steering me in another direction right away, saying I was too young and that no doctor would perform the surgery. She pushed the benefits and “beneficial” side effects of birth control pills and IUDs, and when I expressed concern about the hormones she dismissed it by saying the amount of the hormone that gets released into the body is minimal. I figured that if the amount of hormone was significant enough to cause the remarkable changes in cervical contractions and breast size that she was advertising then it was too much. I didn’t want any chemicals changing my body’s chemistry. She simply dismissed my concerns and handed me a bunch of pamphlets for birth control products.

I can understand in some ways how insisting on permanent contraception so “early” in my sexual life might seem a little hasty to some, but remember that I spent many years fearing pregnancy so intensely that I expressly avoided intercourse. I knew what I wanted. In spite of the doctor’s attempts to steer me away from it, I again insisted that I wanted a tubal ligation. She told me that no one would perform one on me unless I was at least 30 years old or already had three kids. I thought those were pretty arbitrary numbers. Besides, the point of having the surgery was so that I would not have three kids, or any. I indicated this, and she told me that I would change my mind and regret it later, so I should instead use a 5-year IUD and then come back if I still wanted the procedure. Maybe then someone would be willing to perform the procedure on a childless woman.

At some point during this conversation I said that, at the very least, I wanted information on how to go about getting one. I asked her what I would have to do to convince her. Finally, she told me that she was not the one who had to be convinced; I would need a referral to a gynecologist, and they would be the one to do the procedure if they chose to do it. I asked for a referral. She refused to refer me, stating that it would be futile. I insisted because I at least wanted to know the steps involved in the process so that I could properly inform myself. I think that was what made her give in—she couldn’t very well deny my request for education—and she proceeded to refer me to a gynecologist on my campus.

To be clear: I recognize the doctor’s obligation to make patients aware of the possible side effects and risks of any surgery. But this must be done in a respectful way, in a way that recognizes a patient’s autonomy. It is unacceptable for anyone to deny your reproductive autonomy because they think you might “change your mind”, especially when this judgment is not based on something you said or did but on traits like your age and sex. I mean, how can an institution act in your “best interest” when it knows next to nothing about you except your demographic characteristics?

Gynecologist: Attempt #1

A few months later I finally met with the gynecologist who would perform (or not) the surgery. She seemed a lot friendlier than my family doctor and a lot more willing to listen to my situation. I gave her the same explanations I gave my family doctor about not wanting kids, etc, and expressed my desire for permanent contraception.

Throughout my explanation she appeared to be listening carefully, but when I finished she adopted a patronizing tone and explained how she once had a patient in this same position who was a little older than I was. She had performed the procedure on this patient, but several years later the patient returned to her demanding that the procedure be reversed because she had fallen in love and had now changed her mind about having children. The procedure is not reversible. The patient was actually angry with the doctor for “letting” her make “such a foolish decision” at “such a young age”. I don’t know if the story is true, but I knew I was supposed to infer that I might similarly change my mind one day, when I find “the right guy”. I think one reason she didn’t take my request seriously was because I was not in a relationship at the time. She sympathized with my feminist passions, but suggested that I would someday grow out of this phase, saying the other patient had used similar reasoning and eventually changed her mind. The gynecologist ultimately didn’t want to feel guilty for taking this kind of option away from me. Well, what about my option to remain child-free?

I explained that I would never blame her for my own decision, and that if I did somehow have a change of heart then I would be perfectly content with adoption. I re-articulated some personal and political elements of the decision (which you can read about in some later sections of this zine), but she didn’t waver. She reminded me that this procedure, like any other form of surgery, involved a degree of risk. She said that she could not perform this operation in good conscience, but said she would ask around to some of her male doctor friends who might consider it, and sent me away with some pamphlets. I don’t know how she “knew” that none of her female doctor friends would do it; she probably assumed that, as women, they would naturally feel the way she did about it. The only things I was able to get from her, besides pamphlets, were an explanation of how the surgery works and the knowledge that (thankfully!) my provincial health insurance would cover all the costs of the surgery.

I was frustrated. No, I was livid. I didn’t understand how someone other than me could be allowed to make such a decision for me. People as young as 16 can legally drive cars and other vehicles, thus putting lots of peoples’ lives at risk every single day. People consume legal drugs like alcohol and nicotine, thus endangering their own lives and those of people around them, and nobody is preventing them from doing so. People rarely question a person’s decision to have a baby, and many folks out there are actively encouraging young poverty-stricken girls who don’t want to be mothers to carry their pregnancies to term. All of this is happening, yet I can’t be allowed to say no, I don’t ever want to have a baby and I’d rather pre-empt the abortions. Someone can say, “Oops, I guess I’m having a baby,” but I can’t say, “None for me, thanks.” Around here it’s easier to have an abortion than to get one’s tubes tied, yet tube-tying is just as permanent and far less traumatic on a physical, emotional, or moral scale. I don’t mean to suggest that abortions are traumatic or that they are immoral, but my tubal ligation was none of those things, while abortions tend to have more of a mixed bag of repercussions for many people. Recognizing a person’s autonomy means recognizing their ability to make decisions for themselves. We need to take responsibility for our decisions, rather than having our decisions made for us.

Gynecologist: Attempt #2

I still don’t know if the gynecologist really intended to ask her colleagues about performing the surgery or if she was just hoping that this “phase” would pass and that I would forget about the whole thing. Maybe that actually happens? Who knows? I wasn’t about to give up because someone didn’t trust my judgment.

Six months later I still had heard nothing from her so I called her office and left a message for her. No response. A week later I called and left another message. No response. A month later I called again and left another message to see if she had had any luck with her friends. Still no response. So I made an appointment to see her as soon as I could, in late spring of 2008. Face-to-face she had to talk to me.

We finally met again and she said that she had consulted her friends and none of them would perform the surgery until I was at least 30 years old—which I still think is an arbitrary number—or until I had already had some kids—which totally defeats the purpose of the surgery! I don’t know if this was true or if she was just trying to discourage me from getting the surgery. I was infuriated, but I held it in. This time, I came prepared with a list of clear arguments. I explained my politics again, more explicitly this time. She reminded me that it was a permanent procedure, and non-reversible—as if I wasn’t aware? That was the whole reason I wanted it. I attempted to negotiate some agreement whereby she would not be held liable, even psychologically, if I changed my mind later, and promised that I would not come to her if I did change my mind someday.

I told her I had already consulted my partner, a man, and that he “was okay with it” and “happy to adopt” if we decided to do so someday. In reality, it was true that he was happy to adopt, but he refused to have any say in what I did with my body, insisting that it was my decision, and that he would support whatever route I chose to take. You’ve got to love feminist men! Though this should have been irrelevant (it is my body, after all), the doctor seemed to be giving in now. I had one last argument (more of a bullying tactic, really) saved up that I hoped I wouldn’t have to use, but I didn’t want to lose my chance. I asked her, “What do I need to do to convince you? Do I have to wait until I accidentally get pregnant and come here and ask you to abort it for me? I don’t want that.” This seemed to be enough, because she finally shook her head and sighed in exasperation.

“Ok,” she said reluctantly, opening her drawer to take out some paperwork.

“‘Ok’?” My heart stopped. “What do you mean?”

She looked at me long and hard. “Ok, I’ll perform your surgery. But that doesn’t mean I won’t wake up one day and change my mind before then.”

I was in disbelief! After all the trouble she had given me, I was afraid I would have to pester her for several years before she finally agreed to do it. I could barely contain my excitement.

Since no one had given me any information yet on how to schedule such surgeries, I was surprised and thrilled to discover that it would take place in August of this year (it was now May or June). I was pleased that this didn’t give her much time to change her mind. Someone from the hospital was going to call me later in the summer to inform me of my surgery date and pre-surgery interview. Now all I had to do was wait.

A systemic problem

I find it really interesting that I, a white, middle-class, able-bodied person, was having a lot of difficulty securing this surgery, while historically and contemporarily women in various minority groups have had such surgeries forced upon them without appropriately informed consent, sometimes with no consent at all, and sometimes without even knowing it was happening. Most often targeted were young, poor, unmarried women—often at the onset of puberty—in an effort to “protect” them from the perils of childbearing while poor or otherwise “unfit”. This was done under the guise of being “for their own good” to mask the classist, sexist, and often racist intent. Within the past 100 years in North America, forced (or “compulsory”) sterilization was imposed on indigenous and Métis women, incarcerated women, women with physical impairments (ex: blindness), women thought to be mentally ill (ex: cognitive impairment, depression, promiscuity, thievery), and women of other visible minority status as a way to prevent the spread of “undesirable” genetic traits (yes, even criminality was thought to be genetic). This was an early form of eugenics practice, and it continued in North America until about the 1970s and 1980s.

Elsewhere around the world, including in Germany, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, India, China, Switzerland, and Sweden, indigenous and mixed-race women have been forcibly sterilized. Roma women in the Czech Republic have also been targeted in this way, as recently as 2003, and sex workers in many places have been forced to undergo the surgery. In some cases these were officially state-sanctioned activities. Often the surgeries were performed during procedures like dental surgery, abortion, or immediately after childbirth, and many women only discovered much later that they had been sterilized. Medical institutions have coerced women into “consenting” to the surgery by lying about its purpose and permanence, by bribing them, and by withholding abortion care unless they consented to sterilization.

All of this and my own experience with trying to secure a sterilization surgery are just two sides of a very ugly medical institution, and of medicine in patriarchal systems more generally. The systemic nature of this form of racism, sexism, colonialism, ablism, classism, and paternalism is evident here, and I expand more on my own experience of the sexist and paternalistic elements throughout this zine.

The surgery

I won’t spend much time on the details of the surgery or pre-surgery. My pre-surgery appointment was a quick visit to the hospital a few weeks before the surgery itself, where a nurse described to me the procedure I was going to undergo. I don’t remember the details of our conversation, but I think someone took some blood to make sure I was healthy enough for the surgery. They sent me home and they gave me instructions of things to do and not do before going to the hospital for the procedure, such as not eating/drinking anything during the 12 hours beforehand.

Surgery day came and went without much fuss. I arrived at the hospital on time and put on a hospital gown. The surgery was delayed by a couple of hours so I hung out with my partner Matt in the waiting area, starving, until I was eventually put on a wheely bed and rolled away. They parked me in the hallway outside the operating room where I had to wait for the surgeon, my gynecologist. As I was lying there, of course I was afraid. All the usual hospital-related myths were racing through my head, including the fear that they might make a mistake and operate on the wrong part of my body by accident, the fear that the anaesthesia might not work properly and that I might wake up screaming in the middle of surgery, the fear that something else might go wrong and I might never wake up, etc, as well as the fear that the gynecologist might change her mind at the very last minute.

When she finally arrived she asked me one last time if I was certain I wanted to go through with it, and I gave her an emphatic “yes”. She explained the procedure to me, saying that she would make two small incisions, one in my belly button and one in my pubic hairline. In one incision they would insert a camera and light so they could watch what they were doing on a screen (this surgical method is called a laparoscopy), while in the other hole they would insert the surgical instruments that would cut the fallopian tubes and clamp/seal the ends. They would need to fill my abdomen with carbon dioxide gas at the beginning so that my organs wouldn’t be all crowded together, and she warned me that the gas would cause me some discomfort in the first couple of days as it worked its way up my body into my left shoulder and eventually out of me. She also said I would probably bleed from my vagina for a few hours after the surgery, and that this was normal. That’s all I remember before they knocked me out.

Anyway, waking up from the surgery was pretty miserable. I was drifting in and out of consciousness and had some severe cramp-like pain in my abdomen, like my insides were being pulled and twisted and torn by someone with dirty hands. This is pretty common, I believe. They gave me another dose of painkillers (morphine or demerol, I think, since I don’t react well to codeine), but I don’t remember it working very well. The nurse was talking to me to see how I was doing, asking me how many kids I had (and was shocked that I had none), and I was groggily forced into my clothes and into a wheelchair so they could send me home.

I was lucky enough to have two men in my life who were able to play supportive roles in the process. My best friend’s partner, who is also a good friend of mine, got off work early the day of my surgery in order to drive me home from the hospital, since Matt and I don’t have a car, and since I wanted to keep the rest of my family out of this until I could figure out how to tell them. This assistance might not seem like much, but it was a big deal because my friend never takes time off work, even when he’s really sick, so it meant a lot that he thought my surgery was important enough to merit it. It was also a big deal because he was supportive of my decision even though he admittedly didn’t understand it or the politics behind it. “That Sarah, she’s always so independent,” he said to Matt while they were waiting for me to wake up. Even though he didn’t understand or necessarily agree with what I was doing, he still supported me in my decision.

The other man in my life who played a vital supportive role was, of course, my partner Matt. I say “of course” only because I already mentioned him above, and not because of course boyfriends and husbands are supportive of this kind of decision. Not all of them are, and some of them actively discourage “letting” women of any age make this kind of decision. Matt not only supported me, but he actually refused to give me his opinion about the surgery because he wanted the decision to be entirely my own. From previous discussions I knew that he was not particularly attached to his genes and was happy to adopt if we decided to have children in our lives after all, but he was reluctant to express an opinion on my decision to have the tubal ligation. He reassured me that he would get behind whichever decision I made. Matt accompanied me to the hospital on the morning of the surgery and hung out in the waiting area all day until I was ready to be taken home. Matt and my friend came to greet me as I was wheeled out to one of the restricted waiting areas. Since I was the only patient left in the room, they allowed the two of them in to sit with me while my paperwork was processed. I was too groggy, nauseated, and in pain to really understand what was going on. I vaguely remember the nurse telling me that after a few days I wouldn’t need the hardcore painkillers anymore and would be able to just take a couple of Tylenol and Advil to manage the swelling and discomfort.

My friend drove us to a pharmacy to pick up some Statex, my prescribed pain medication, and then drove us home. I slept a lot for the next few days, and Matt spent a few days taking care of me until I was able to prepare my own food again and then all was pretty much back to normal. I found the Statex useless and unpleasant because it severely nauseated me, so as early as the day after my surgery I was already down to taking just Tylenol and Advil, which worked fine. The surgery was on a Tuesday, and by Friday I was able to run some errands and go out with some friends. I was moving very slowly as I felt pretty tender and exhausted and was worried I might tear something if I moved too quickly.

People have freaked out at me about the “risks” of this kind of procedure (it is surgery, after all). My response? Pregnancy is risky. Giving birth is risky. Abortions are risky. Driving a car is risky. Drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, eating bacon or sushi, and many of the other things my critics probably do are risky to themselves and sometimes to others around them. Life is risky. This surgery was not a big deal, and might have even prevented future risks. I won’t lie to you: recovery was not fun. Overall, though, I’d say the gas collecting in my left shoulder was probably the most painful thing I experienced after the day of the surgery. I can’t really explain the sensation but it was wretched (I’m pretty sure the gas in my abdomen was the main cause of my pain after waking from the surgery, too). It took at least a couple of days for that shoulder pain to be gone, about a week to walk normally again, and maybe two weeks until I felt pretty much back to normal. And, I was asleep for the entire procedure!

Persuasion

The following tips might help you convince your doctor or gynecologist to perform your tubal ligation. I don’t know if they will succeed in situations where your gender and/or sexual orientation are not easily recognizable or definable, but it’s still worth trying.

* Remember that the doctor probably sees the world very differently than you do, so you need to present them with a version of yourself that they will understand. The less they “get” where you’re coming from, the more likely they are to think you’re going through a rebellious “phase” that won’t last long. Similarly, I’m generally taken more seriously when a decision is seen as my “choice” or “obligation” rather than my “politics” (compare this to how vegans are taken less seriously than people with egg and dairy allergies or aversions when explaining dietary restrictions). This can take as many forms as there are people to try it, but I predict the most reliable approach is to try to seem “normal” or “average” when talking to your doctor about it. Alternately, if you’re patient, prepared, and ready for a possible uphill battle, or if you have an awesome feminist doctors, then by all means approach them as the gender warrior that you are!

* The doctor probably wants to hear that you are in a stable, long-term, monogamous relationship, that you’ve discussed your options with your partner, and that you’re both totally fine with the procedure and happy to adopt if you change your minds (whether or not any of this is true). Why? I think there’s a subtle underlying assumption in our culture that we must punish promiscuous women and defer to men’s approval for such big decisions. The easiest way to get what you want is probably to come across as straight-laced and “responsible”, but, of course, if you’re ready for the challenge then embrace your slutty self and take them on! (And let me know if your approach has any success!)

* Tell the doctor you’ve wanted this surgery for a very long time. If they think it’s a new/recent idea, they’re more likely to think you’ll change your mind and deny you the surgery until more time has passed. They don’t want to be blamed for “letting” you make “such a foolish decision”. Translation: Mainstream culture tends to characterize young women as flighty and changeable and thus unable to make sound decisions, so you must appear very determined.

* Do your research! Know that you might change your mind someday, that it’s a permanent procedure, that reversal procedures are expensive and unreliable, and know the risks involved (see following page). If you think it will help, try to bring statistics to back up your arguments. I recently came across stats about parents of adult children which indicated that nearly 70% of them, if they could live life over again, would have elected to not have kids at all. That sort of thing could potentially help your argument.

* Doctors are less likely and less willing to perform these surgeries on young people, but do not lie about your age. The doctor has access to all your medical information, so lying about this or anything else they can verify will only hurt your case.

* Be clear that you are familiar with other methods of birth control, and make a clear case for why these will not do for you (i.e. they are not permanent, accidents can happen, maybe you have a medical condition that makes abortion or hormone pills or pregnancy a bad idea, etc).

* Make it very clear that you won’t change your mind, but also be clear that you have other options (in vitro fertilization, adoption, etc) if you do. Also, have an answer prepared for when the doctor asks you why your partner doesn’t just get a vasectomy, which is far less invasive or risky.

* Finally, do not back down. Make it clear that you want this procedure and that you will do whatever it takes to get it. Do not come across as uncertain or hesitant, because they will probably use this to turn you down. Keep on pushing!

The risks

When trying to convince your doctor that you know what you are “getting yourself into”, it’s good to demonstrate your awareness of the possible risks of this surgery. This list is not exhaustive by any means, but it should help. The risks of a tubal ligation via laparoscopy include:

* You might change your mind. It sounds ridiculous, but many sources actually list this as a “risk” for this surgery. I wonder if anyone tells pregnant people or people who are trying to become pregnant that they run the risk of changing their minds? The procedure is technically reversible, but reversal procedures are expensive, not usually covered by any insurance, and have relatively low success rates. That’s why a tubal ligation is referred to as “permanent”.

* Pregnancy and ectopic pregnancy. That is, the egg and sperm sometimes find each other in spite of the surgery. Rarely is the surgery unsuccessful, but when it is pregnancy can occur. For various reasons, however, the zygote occasionally gets implanted too far into the fallopian tube, and this results in an ectopic pregnancy. To be clear, ectopic pregnancies can occur in any female, but the risk is slightly elevated for people who have undergone a tubal ligation. As the implanted zygote grows it can be painful and damage your tubes. This is actually really dangerous and can lead to death if not treated. Ectopic pregnancies are very rare and usually only happen 7-10 years after the procedure was performed. When it does happen, it’s usually because, over the course of several years, the fallopian tube found a way to fuse itself back together.

* Like any surgery, there’s always a risk of complications. For example, if the laparoscope is old and has a specific kind of defect or malfunction that I don’t quite understand, it can actually burn a tiny hole in your intestines while they’re operating on your fallopian tubes, which could cause you problems for years to come. It’s extremely rare, but it has happened.

* Other complications can occur as well. Some people have a hard time waking up from anaesthesia, or simply don’t react well to it, which can sometimes lead to various problems. Sometimes the incisions don’t heal well and you wind up with infections. Also, doctors are only human, so they make mistakes. Because all your organs are crammed in there together, there’s a small chance your intestines or bladder might get nicked during surgery. These are potential risks involved with any surgery, but they are very rare.

* Like any surgery, there is a small chance that the complications will be so severe that they cause death. To be clear, though, pregnancy and giving birth carry the same risk, but to a much greater degree. There’s a statistic that 4 in 100,000 tubal ligations result in death, while there were 13 reported maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in the US in 2004 (and 12 in 2003). Even so, no one challenges the women who get pregnant about whether it’s “worth the risks”. I think I’ll take my chances!

Don’t just take my word for it, though—do your research! When I first began thinking about the procedure, I was fairly unaware of the risks. When I became aware, however, I still felt the risks were far more tolerable than having to worry about pregnancy for the rest of my life. I felt the peace of mind granted by the surgery was well worth the risks, and you might, too.

[click here for part 4 of 6]

[This is the 2nd of 6 posts where I share the content of my recent zine, "Ask me about my tubal ligation", published by EXILE Press in February 2010. To read the 1st post, click here. To order a copy, feel free to visit exilebooks.org, microcosmpublishing.com, or akpress.org (coming soon). Thanks for your interest  :) ]

Part 1: Growing Up a Girl

Little women

I’ve known for a long time that I don’t want kids, but I didn’t always know that it was a real option. Having kids is just “what girls do.” We’re supposed to have babies, and when we’re not having babies we’re dreaming about having babies.

Like most other girls, when I was young I would think up names for my future kids, imagine what they might look like, or think about how I would dress them up or raise them. Ultimately, I don’t attribute much importance to these daydreams because they occurred on the same level as my desire for a pet monkey—I thought up names for it, too, and imagined dressing it up, etc. The idea was fun and exciting at the time, but ultimately I grew up and realized I had no time, patience, or even a real desire for a pet monkey—or for a baby. I liked the idea of holding it, playing with it, of being the one thing it loves more than anything else in the world. I think we all desire that kind of recognition, on some level. These are not good enough reasons to have children. Pets maybe, but not children. The daydream and the reality are two very different things.

I would love to play with someone else’s, and maybe monkey-sit or baby-sit for a few hours or for a day, but the full-time responsibility of actually caring for it and being responsible for it and having to organize my life around it is an entirely different reality. I don’t have the desire or the resources to devote myself to a dependent, living creature like that on a full-time basis when there are so many problems in this world that need to be fixed, and so many new, amazing projects to be imagined and organized. I don’t think I can successfully be both an activist and a parent.

Growing up, though, it was never a question of if I would have any, but when and how many; I was a girl and therefore I would eventually have babies. Period. That’s how girls are raised. Everyone keeps telling us that things will change “when you get pregnant” and “when you have kids of your own.” Supposedly, when the “maternal instinct” kicks in, I will develop the desire and the patience. The assumption is always that I will eventually have my own babies. An example that I can clearly remember because I’ve been hearing it for nearly 10 years is, “What will you tell your kids when they want tattoos, coloured hair, and/or body piercings?” I’ve even been told to avoid getting tattoos on particular parts of my body because I would regret it when I got pregnant. We’re expected to live our lives around the certain eventualities of pregnancy and childrearing.

This expectation was so deeply ingrained in me that when I first began to realize I didn’t like kids and certainly didn’t want to have any, I actually felt bad about it and thought there was something wrong with me. I thought that I must be a bad person for not wanting children—not just not now, but not ever. Everyone I mentioned this to also thought it was strange or dismissed it and figured it was “just a phase”.

My mother had three accidental children, and I often worried that I would inevitably, reluctantly, follow suit. The mostly fictional abortion horror stories I grew up with, paired with the heavy stigma attached to abortion, were enough to make termination an unappealing option. My adolescent reasoning, influenced by my Catholic high school’s approach to sex education, led me to believe that I would inevitably get pregnant if I became sexually active. I was so terrified of this possibility that, rather than look into effective options for contraception, I decided to abstain from intercourse entirely (unlike most of my peers, who went ahead and had sex anyway). I arbitrarily chose “until I get married” as my first hurdle, but eventually decided I didn’t want to ever get married. That was no longer a useful milestone, so I remained abstinent without a clear idea of when I would stop.

The “good girl” complex

So by the age of 23 I had a lot of these ideas in my head, but I still had not had sexual intercourse; I was too terrified of the risks. Abstinence worked fine for me: I didn’t have to worry about pregnancy as I simply avoided sex. I was also suffering from a crippling “good girl” complex. For many years I was obsessed with being a “good girl” so I didn’t drink or smoke or even swear, and I certainly didn’t have sex. I didn’t want to be viewed in a different light by my family, friends, and the rest of the world. I wasn’t aware of the concept of “whore stigma” at the time, I just didn’t want to be seen as a person who had had sex. I felt like it would change me, and would change how others saw me. I would somehow no longer be “good”. I didn’t fear being thought of as “easy” or a “slut” because I knew those terms were very far from me; somehow, though, I thought that having intercourse even just once would change me in a bad way, so I actively avoided it.

Avoiding intercourse, however, didn’t mean avoiding various forms of “fooling around.” My Catholic high school’s brand of abstinence-only education made sex out to be a very bad and singular thing, and I grew up with a very narrow understanding of what sex was. Until recently, I thought sex referred exclusively to intercourse, and that everything else was, morally speaking, a gray area. It never occurred to me that non-intercourse activities could still be risky, in terms of pregnancy and a wide variety of STIs, and I never learned how to make them “safe”.

I projected my fear onto other people as well. I remember being in CEGEP and university and feeling embarrassed for the students who were visibly pregnant. I was unable to see anything beautiful or positive in it; all I saw was evidence of their sexuality physically embedded in their bodies, and I felt embarrassed by it. When I look back I realize that I was deeply scarred, but I can’t connect it to any single event or experience.

Freedom..?

Anyway, when I was 23 I enrolled myself in a course called Sex Rights, Sex Wrongs. To this day I do not know what motivated me to do it. This was a point in my life when I blushed upon hearing the word “sex” and could not even say the word out loud. It was right up there with all the swear words I refused to say. Somehow I wound up taking that course, and it completely changed the way I understood the world of sex and sexuality. I don’t have room to elaborate upon this here, but it helped me work past the shame that enveloped that part of my life. I spent an entire semester reading works about sex, about sex work, about sexuality, and I even spoke the word several times when proudly describing the course to people who were visibly embarrassed to hear about it! It was really strange to be on the other side for once.

After that course ended, I finally had the courage to start thinking about sex with a newly opened mind. I was less afraid of the stigma, but still afraid of the possibility of pregnancy. Several months after the course ended, not long before I turned 24, I finally became sexually active (in the intercourse sense) and realized that condoms alone were not enough to give me peace of mind.

Every birth control option seemed undesirable or impossible: I didn’t want to take hormones in pill-form that would screw with my body’s chemistry—even if they were likely to relieve my severe menstrual cramps, reduce my heavy bleeding, and increase my breast size (I take it some people consider this a “bonus” rather than a side effect?). I was almost as terrified of side effects as I was of becoming pregnant. I just didn’t want to indefinitely pollute my body with pills of any kind. I also didn’t want the stress of potentially forgetting a dose or falling off-schedule. The comfort provided by “the pill” just seemed so precarious. It didn’t seem worth it—there had to be a better option. The hormone patches and injections presented similar problems, but with worse side effects.

Most IUDs also release synthetic hormones into your body and one of their potential side effects is that they can make menstruation even more painful and unpleasant. Another side effect is that they can increase menstrual bleeding, which can cause iron-deficiency anemia (a lot of women are already iron-deficient or anemic). The potential side effects of the various hormone-related methods freaked me out. Aside from all this, the very idea of having something plastic or metallic lodged in my cervix (IUD) was really unappealing.

At this point in my life, almost every woman with whom I had had a reproductive health-related conversation reported having a history of bladder infections, yeast infections, various problems with periods, ovarian cysts, miscarriages, and more—and all of these women were taking or had previously taken some sort of hormone-related contraceptive. I was not taking any, and I had experienced none of those problems. I don’t know if there is any connection between them in these specific instances, but the possibility of a connection deepened my resolve to stay away from hormones. I just wanted a contraceptive that was safe and long-term—even permanent, if possible. I knew that doctors didn’t perform tubal ligations on people as young as I was, but I figured I’d ask anyway.

[click here to read the 3rd post]