ABSTRACT

In the United States in 1982, 28 percent of all married women 15–44 years of age were protected by contraceptive sterilization. Among all married US couples who intend to have no more children, up to 80 percent are protected by female or male sterilization within 25 years of the birth of their last wanted child. This chapter presents a general model for understanding the choice of sterilization as a contraceptive method and test the model with data collected from a sample of US women. Given its popularity and the fact that sterilization must be treated by both consumers and family planning practitioners as an irreversible procedure, a better understanding is needed of why and how couples choose sterilization as their method of contraception. Thirty-one percent of the women favored sterilization for safety reasons, and 10 percent because other contraceptive methods were unacceptable to them.