My father was the youngest of eleven, my mother the youngest of ten. We are a fertile bunch. Mother claimed to have strained my oldest sister through two kinds of birth control that were available back in 1946. When I was five, she forged my father’s signature in order to get a hysterectomy so she could stop getting pregnant, back when women had no authority over their own bodies.
In Idaho at seventeen, I learned firsthand that the rhythm method didn’t work very well on rabbits, after the sperm donor disappeared into the navy. I became an early adopter of quinine sulfate on the advice of a waitress I worked with, nights and weekends my senior year of high school. No, not hydroxychloroquine, but the natural antimalarial, also touted as a possible abortifacient. It could be purchased over the counter at any pharmacy, even though it raised pharmacists’ eyebrows. Two months of doses high enough to make me dizzy and I miscarried after my waitress night shift the week before high school graduation. Whether the quinine sulfate had anything to do with it is not known. Abortion was illegal in Idaho in 1969.
In Colorado at eighteen, I got my first birth control pills. In Hawaii at nineteen, it became clear that I needed very high hormone doses to regulate my cycle. IUDs had just become available, and I happily got in line. And then that Dalkon Shield fell out into my hand at an inopportune moment, so I got a Lippes Loop.
I finally settled into a relationship with a nice guy. He had been raised Catholic, with all the guilt about sex that may (or may not) confer, so he justified intimacy to himself by talking about how he wanted us to have kids someday. At 22, midway through undergraduate work, Lippes let me down and I was pregnant again. And the nice guy said, ‘Well, I didn’t mean NOW!’ Abortion was legal in Hawaii and I didn’t need anyone to sign for me.
We got married when I was 24. I was back on birth control pills at the high hormone levels I required for regulation, and continued to wait for my husband to decide whether he actually wanted kids. I was ambivalent, fairly certain that the world had quite enough representation from my family’s gene pool. With no such commitment to children forthcoming, I started graduate school. And waited. At 29, I finally said ‘enough’ and had a tubal ligation. I did not need my husband’s signature in Hawaii to be sterilized, even though taking control of my reproduction ended the marriage. I awoke in recovery with three other women - well, two teenagers and one woman older than me. The teens had abortions, I was a tubal ligation and the woman was hoping to find out if she could try again after her most recent miscarriage. No sense of justice in that recovery room; the only one of us who wanted children couldn’t keep one, and the rest of us were doing what we could to not have a child.
Women who don’t want children should be able to not have children without having to seek permission from the patriarchy to stop the machinery. If you didn’t come equipped with the parts to incubate human babies, you should not get to vote on the regulation and deployment of those parts. Go raise actual rabbits.