My body my choice

I mentioned in another post that I finally got my tubes tied. Well.. burned actually, but same thing. I've wanted to not have more children ever since I was pregnant with Wes and that was almost 6 years ago. I knew I was finished having babies and I wanted to make it permanent.

We were living in Japan when I first approached my doctor about this. Wesley was oh two or so at that time. I'd throughly enjoyed the baby phase with him, but I knew I didn't want to repeat it. My doctor there informed me I was too young to make a permanent decision regarding my fertility. I tried arguing, but he was the only one that could do it and he wouldn't. I gave up because we were moving soon.

We moved to Missouri and once again I was told I was too young to make that decision. When I kept asking at every doctor visit, my doctor finally said she liked the men to do it, but understood that men (especially military men) don't want their balls touched. When I explained that Cody was willing to do it but his doctor wouldn't do the referral, my doctor gave the referral to him. She made sure that his referral doctor would do it too.

So that leads us to this past doctor visit. I know that Cody is broken and yet the thought of being pregnant again made me literally ill to my stomach. When you literally vomit at the thought of actually being pregnant and every day your period is late makes you ill.... well I think it's safe to say you don't want more babies.

What I found though is that even though I'm 25, married, and have two older children, I'm still too young to decide my reproductive years are over. I had to really argue my point before both doctors would agree to let me do it.

This truly puzzles me and I figured out why in these past couple days.

If I were pregnant and wanted an abortion, no one would stop me. They might not agree with my actions but it would boil down to "my body, my choice."

If I was birthing a child a year, even if people didn't agree with me having that many children, it would boil down to "my body, my life, my choice."

So why doesn't this thinking apply to taking measures to permanently ending my reproductiveness? Why don't they caution me on the dangers of making a decision like that when I'm young and then allow me to do it anyway because it is my body and my choice. Why do I have to blatantly tell them that the thought of being pregnant again makes me violently ill and want to open a vein before they realize that I really do understand what this would mean for me? Why do they carte blanch decide that I can not possibly be old enough to realize the ramifications of what sterilization means?

I didn't really realize how scared I'd been that they'd change their minds until everything was actually all done. I didn't realize how pissed off I was about this "you're too young to decide" system until I was finally out of it. I'd spent so much time fighting that I didn't realize how angry it made me.

It's over and done with now and I'm letting it go, but I realized all this today and just wanted to get it off my chest.