By Leila Miller
Crisis Magazine
Those of us who defend Church teaching on human sexuality often focus on the immorality of contraception: condoms, diaphragms, spermicides, birth control pills, birth control patches, birth control rings, birth control sponges, birth control implants, birth control injections, IUDs… and whatever other contraceptives I am forgetting (I am sure scientists are working on more ways to thwart fertility as we speak).
But we don’t often discuss sterilization, specifically, vasectomies and tubal ligations.
When my husband and I were newly married, we planned for two children but would not rule out a third. Turns out, we liked the first two so much that I talked him into number three. We made sure they came in quick succession though, so that we could be free to “have fun and travel in our forties”.
After our third was born, it was time to get serious about getting sterile, and my husband and I agreed that he would get a vasectomy. I joked to friends that I surely wouldn’t be the one getting sterilized because “it was against my religion [Catholic] but not his [agnostic Jew]!” As a lapsed Catholic at the time, I thought that was pretty clever.
But a funny thing happened on the way to our “planned barrenhood”: We both had profound conversions of heart. And one of the easiest things to see when we took off the secular blinders was the immorality of surgical sterilization. What once seemed responsible now seemed perverse.
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Leila Miller is a wife and mother of eight children who has a penchant for writing and a passion for teaching the Catholic Faith in simple ways. This summa cum laude Boston College graduate also loves to debate atheists, advocate for special needs orphans, and attempt the matchmaking of young Catholic singles (not necessarily in that order).
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