“I remember going to the doctors when I was 15, 16, and saying I would like to be sterilised. And they were like, 'No - here’s the pill.' ”
I feel like I’ve been childfree since I knew how babies were made. This was something in me since I was little. I would play with dolls and my Barbies like everyone else would, but I’ve never felt the desire to be a mum.
I remember going to the doctors when I was 15, 16, and saying I would like to be sterilised. And they were like, “No – here’s the pill.” Every six months, when I went back to fill my prescription, I’d ask again. I don’t remember the exact responses but they always amounted to a no. I was never taken seriously.
I grew up feeling like I didn’t have much of a childhood. I saw my mum trapped in a marriage with three kids that she couldn’t really get out of. I remember thinking “Gosh, she seems so unhappy.” She told me that she had wanted to adopt and my dad hadn’t, so my sisters and I were all potentially children that weren’t particularly wanted. It is quite interesting that my two older sisters don’t have kids either – the genetic line has ended with us.
“I always felt like my body wasn’t my own, like I wasn’t taken seriously because of my age. It’s really, really patronising.”
When I was about 16, 17, I was training and then studying to be a social worker, working with children and families. I’ve always known that there are plenty of children without homes of their own, and I’ve never understood why we can’t prioritise those kids over having our own. I was more outspoken about not wanting kids when I was younger. I’ve mellowed a bit, but when I turned vegan as a teenager and did all kinds of animal rights stuff, I was big on, “This is my opinion.”
My partner at the time knew it since we got together. But I remember conversations when we’d been together a couple of years, when they said, “I don’t know if I want children.” I was like, “I don’t care that we’re 18, 19, 20 – why would we live together, get a house together, talk about these futures together? You’re literally wasting my time.” I don’t remember us ever having a discussion like, “Can you wear condoms?” It was very much on me to take care of the contraception, as the woman. But I didn’t like the side effects, or the idea of hormones and stuff going into my body that shouldn’t be there.
“It’s that hysterical woman thing. If you kick off, it’s how you kick off, isn’t it? If you assert yourself, are you going to be seen as unstable?”
To me, sterilisation always felt to me like the natural thing to do, the lesser of many evils. I was like, “OK, it’s going to be shitty. But it’s shitty once, and that’s it forever.” I always felt like my body wasn’t my own, like I wasn’t taken seriously because of my age. It’s really, really patronising.
When my GP eventually referred me to a gynaecologist, they sent me to one of those psychosexual counsellors who told me that my wish for sterilisation was like wanting to “chop your own arm off”. I took my partner along to the second session, and we smuggled in a hidden recording device because we thought, we don’t know what she’s going to say now. Obviously her job was to push me, but you thought she would have done it in a more holistic, therapeutic manner.
Ultimately the counsellor said, “I’m not OK with this, but I’m OK to sign you off, and say you can do it.” I rang up the gynaecologist saying I had my letter of recommendation, and he was like, “Oh I didn’t send you there for her to sign you off. I sent you there because I thought you needed help.” He’d seen in my records that I went to counselling as a teenager, and I thought, how has that got anything to do with this? But he was adamant: “I was never going to do the operation.”
It’s that hysterical woman thing. If you kick off, it’s how you kick off, isn’t it? If you assert yourself, are you going to be seen as unstable? Because they’re not going to do this procedure for an emotionally unstable woman. Like, you must hold space for the fact that you might change your mind, but then how do you answer for that? “Well if I did change my mind, this is what I’d do…” Then they’re like, “Ah, see – you might change your mind.” Whatever you say, you can’t win. So you need to play the whole system.
“I went to all my appointments with my partner, wearing fake engagement rings, because he needed to be there and we needed to be together permanently.”
That’s when I changed GP. I went to the new GP before my files had moved over and got a referral to a private hospital – so they couldn’t see my records and all the things they could use to judge me. I went to all my appointments with my partner, wearing fake engagement rings, because he needed to be there and we needed to be together permanently. My body is my own, but I thought, I’m not going to get into that, I’m just going to do this to get what I want. I had to jump through hoops like a bloody dog in a tutu.
When I went private, most of the people I dealt with were men – including the doctor who did my operation, and the chief medical officer of the whole hospital who needed to give a second opinion, because of my age. It was all men making decisions about my body. I had to pay out thousands of pounds to them, and it geniunely changed something when I put on a ring I got out of a magazine for 50p.
I finally got the operation when I had just turned 21. The doctor who performed the procedure said, “I would love for you to contact me in 10 years, if you’re still childfree and haven’t wanted this reversed, haven’t regretted it. Because this is a very big thing for me to and very novel to do for a woman your age…”
“I don’t regret anything, because there are so many ways to give love.”
I’m 33 now, and I’ve thought, maybe I should contact that doctor and be like, “I hope you’ve changed who you are as a bloody doctor in the last 10 years.” But I know I don’t owe him a “Don’t worry, you made the right decision.” Because this is a decision that I made as an adult. The accountability’s on me.
I don’t regret anything, because there are so many ways to give love. It doesn’t have to be selfishly about a kid we’re biologically related to. Isn’t that just how wars happen, and so much conflict? Because we don’t see that every kid is our kid, and this is everyone’s planet to care for, for the next generation.
As a social worker, I’ve seen so many amazing adoptive mothers, foster carers, the estate grans who have all the kids in their house because they haven’t got a decent home to go to, and feed them all at tea time. It reminds me of when I was growing up, and I’d go my friends’ mums’ houses, and they were adoptive mothers for me in different ways.
There are so many other ways to mother. I remember reading this once, and I thought it was beautiful, the idea that mothering is a verb. It doesn’t start and end with giving birth, it’s something we can all do.
Photos by Zoë Noble
Words edited by James Glazebrook