Ethical and Legal Considerations for Sterilization Refusal in Nulliparous Women.

We address the ethical and legal considerations for elective tubal sterilization in young, nulliparous women in Canada, with comparison with the United States and the United Kingdom. Professional guidelines recommend that age and parity should not be obstacles for receiving elective permanent contraception; however, many physicians hesitate to provide this procedure to young women because of the permanence of the procedure and the speculative possibility of regret. At the practice level, this means that there are barriers for young women to access elective sterilization; they are questioned or not taken seriously, or their desire for sterilization is more generally belittled by health care professionals. This article argues for further consideration of these requests and considers the ethical and legal issues that arise when preventing regret is prioritized over autonomy in medical practice. In Canada, there is a paucity of professional guidelines and articles offering practical considerations for handling such requests. Compared with the U.S. and U.K. policy contexts, we propose a patient-centered approach for practice to address requests for tubal sterilization that prioritizes informed consent and respect for patient autonomy. We ultimately aim to assure physicians that when the conditions of informed consent are met and documented, they practice within the limits of the law and in line with best ethical practice by respecting their patients' choice of contraceptive interventions and by ensuring their access to care.

Da gestação à laqueadura: cartografia de uma mãe órfã vivenciada em um Consultório na Rua / De la gestación a la ligadura de trompas: cartografía de una madre huérfana vivida en un consultorio en la calle / From pregnancy to sterilization: a cartography of an orphan mother experienced in a Clinic at the Street

Este artigo buscou mapear os afetos em cenas que ocorreram em uma vivência em um Consultório na Rua (CnaR) por meio da realização de uma cartografia. Os territórios mapeados, junto com a intercessão da obra "Sandman" de Neil Gaiman, que foi utilizada como dispositivo cognitivo de discussão da fantasia-realidade, evidenciaram modos de viver que desafiam os métodos tradicionais de produzir cuidado, enquanto tornaram visíveis capturas micropolíticas que levaram à produção de controle e enquadramento. Diante disso, foi perceptível no CnaR uma potência de produção de outros modos de cuidado ao mesmo tempo que as capturas micropolíticas para controle do vivente da rua agem agressivamente maquinando a produção da necessidade de esterilizações e desmaternizações com o sequestro de bebês pelo Estado. (AU)

El objetivo de este artículo fue mapear los afectos en escenas ocurridas en una experiencia en un consultorio en la calle (en portugués, Consultório na Rua - CnaR) por medio de la realización de una cartografía. Los territorios mapeados, juntamente con la intercesión de la obra Sandman de Neil Gaiman utilizada como dispositivo cognitivo de discusión de la fantasía-realidad, pusieron en evidencia modos de vivir que desafían los métodos tradicionales de producir cuidado, puesto que dieron visibilidad a capturas micropolíticas que llevaron a la producción de control y encuadre. Ante esto, fue perceptible en el CnaR una potencia de producción de otros modos de cuidado, al mismo tiempo que las capturas micropolíticas para control de la persona que vive en la calle actúan agresivamente maquinando la producción de la necesidad de esterilizaciones y desmaternizaciones juntamente con el secuestro de bebés por parte del Estado. (AU)

This article aimed to map the affections in scenes that occurred in an experience in a Clinic at the Street (CnaR) through the realization of a cartography. Mapped territories, with the intercession of Neil Gaiman's Sandman used as a cognitive device for the discussion of reality-fantasy, have highlighted ways of life that challenge traditional methods of care production, while making visible micropolitical captures that led to production of control and framing. Therefore, it was noticeable in the CnaR a potency of production of new ways of care, but at the same time, there are micropolitical captures for the control of street dwellers, conspiring aggressively to produce needs of sterilization and de-motherhood as well as the kidnapping of babies by the State. (AU)

Factores sociodemográficos y obstétricos relacionados con aplicación del consentimiento informado en procedimientos de oclusión tubárica. Cartagena-Colombia / Sociodemographic and obstetric factors related to the application of informed consent in procedures of tubal occlusion. Cartagena-Colombia

Introducción: La forma como se aplica el consentimiento informado (CI) en algunas instituciones prestadoras de salud, donde se realizan procedimientos de oclusión tubárica bilateral (OTB) en Cartagena, podría verse influenciado por factores de tipo sociodemográfico y factores de tipo obstétrico, que al final determinan la forma como se aplica el Consentimiento informado y que este sea más que un requisito para desligar responsabilidades por parte de profesionales en su relación médico- paciente. Objetivo: Determinar la influencia de los factores sociodemográficos y obstétricos en la aplicación del consentimiento informado, en procedimientos de OTB, en centros de salud de Cartagena. Material y Métodos: Se realizó un estudio descriptivo transversal prospectivo. Las fuentes de información consultadas son fuentes primarias; se encuestaron 196 pacientes que se realizaron procedimientos de cesárea por urgencias más oclusión tubárica bilateral. Se efectuó análisis Univariado y Bivariado para establecer tendencia a la asociación mediante la prueba de Chi cuadrado. Resultados: Dentro de las características sociodemográficas y obstétricas asociadas estadísticamente con conocer lo que es el consentimiento informado están tener más de 24 años (p= 0,033); ser de procedencia urbana (p=0,046); vivir en estrato superior a estrato 1 y 2 (p=0,0001), tener estudios superiores a primaria (p=0,0001); no tener más de dos embarazos (p=0,029) y asistir a control prenatal (p=0,0001). Conclusiones: La mayoría de las pacientes poseen en términos generales desconocimiento sobre el CI. El estrato socioeconómico, el nivel de escolaridad y la procedencia influyen en el nivel de conocimiento que tienen del CI, lo mismo que algunos factores obstétricos(AU)

Introduction: The way in which informed consent (IC) is applied in some healthcare institutions where bilateral tubal occlusion (OTB) procedures are performed in Cartagena could be influenced by sociodemographic and obstetric factors which ultimately determine the way at which informed consent is applied, being this more than a requirement for the professionals to be free of liability in their doctor-patient relationship. Objective: To determine the influence of sociodemographic and obstetric factors on the application of informed consent in OTB procedures in health centers in Cartagena. Material and Methods: A prospective cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out. Primary sources of information were consulted; a total of 196 patients who underwent cesarean section procedures for emergencies plus bilateral tubal occlusion were surveyed. Univariate and bivariate analyzes were performed to establish a tendency to association using the Chi-square test. Results: Some sociodemographic and obstetric characteristics statistically associated with knowledge about informed consent are to be over 24 years old (p=0.033); to be of urban origin (p=0.046); to live in stratum higher than stratum 1 and 2 (p=0.0001), to have higher education than primary (p=0.0001); not to have more than two pregnancies (p=0.029) and to attend prenatal care (p=0.0001), among others. Conclusions: Most patients are generally unaware of IC. The socioeconomic stratum, level of schooling, origin and some obstetric factors have an influence on their level of knowledge of IC(AU)

Regret, shame, and denials of women's voluntary sterilization.

Women face extraordinary difficulty in seeking sterilization as physicians routinely deny them the procedure. Physicians defend such denials by citing the possibility of future regret, a well-studied phenomenon in women's sterilization literature. Regret is, however, a problematic emotion upon which to deny reproductive freedom as regret is neither satisfactorily defined and measured, nor is it centered in analogous cases regarding men's decision to undergo sterilization or the decision of women to undergo fertility treatment. Why then is regret such a concern in the voluntary sterilization of women? I argue that regret is centered in women's voluntary sterilization due to pronatalism or expectations that womanhood means motherhood. Women seeking voluntary sterilization are regarded as a deviant identity that rejects what is taken to be their essential role of motherhood and they are thus seen as vulnerable to regret.

Tubal Sterilization in Women Under 30: Case Series and Ethical Implications.

OBJECTIVE: According to the SOGC Contraception Consensus, it is recommended that permanent contraception be offered to women regardless of age or parity. Many women who desire sterilization at a young age experience barriers from physicians who decline to facilitate the request. METHODS: As part of a quality assurance project, we performed a review of cases where tubal sterilization was performed in women under 30 over a 42-month period (September 2013-March 2017). We also performed a literature review on the ethical and clinical considerations with respect to young women requesting permanent contraception. RESULTS: We identified 29 women under 30 who had consented for tubal sterilization; 27.5% of women were nulliparous, and 27.5% had a medical condition for which unintended pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of adverse event. As documented in the patients' records, many women expressed prior difficulty in obtaining the procedure. Despite being informed of the risk of regret, most women proceed with the surgical procedure. Three additional women had consented and subsequently cancelled their surgical procedure. CONCLUSION: Women who are well-informed and desire permanent contraception should be offered the procedure, regardless of age or parity. Declining such requests is a form of conscientious refusal and is not a clinical decision.

The role of anticipated decision regret and the patient's best interest in sterilisation and medically assisted reproduction.

There is a clear discrepancy in the way those who request medical assistance in pursuit of their reproductive choices are treated. On the one hand, women who request a sterilisation are urged to consider possible future regrets and are sometimes refused treatment in anticipation of such regrets. This is despite the fact that for all age ranges, the majority of women undergoing a sterilisation do not regret the decision. Moreover, women who are voluntarily childless are likely to have a happier and more gratifying life than parents. On the other hand, women who request fertility treatment are not urged to second guess their desire for parenthood. Although the fact that the probability of regret is expected to be higher in the former case than in the latter justifies this difference in treatment to a certain extent, the gap between the two different approaches is wider than it ought to be if we also take future well-being into consideration, instead of focussing exclusively on anticipated decision regret.

Autonomy, age and sterilisation requests.

Sterilisation requests made by young, child-free adults are frequently denied by doctors, despite sterilisation being legally available to individuals over the age of 18. A commonly given reason for denied requests is that the patient will later regret their decision. In this paper, I examine whether the possibility of future regret is a good reason for denying a sterilisation request. I argue that it is not and hence that decision-competent adults who have no desire to have children should have their requests approved. It is a condition of being recognised as autonomous that a person ought to be permitted to make decisions that they might later regret, provided that their decision is justified at the time that it is made. There is also evidence to suggest that sterilisation requests made by men are more likely to be approved than requests made by women, even when age and number of children are factored in. This may indicate that attitudes towards sterilisation are influenced by gender discourses that define women in terms of reproduction and mothering. If this is the case, then it is unjustified and should be addressed. There is no good reason to judge people's sterilisation requests differently in virtue of their gender.

Tubal sterilisation without consent: a case report.

INTRODUCTION: Tubal sterilisation is practised all over the world. This safe, easy and highly effective, long-term method for birth control can be carried out during the hospital stay for either a normal delivery or caesarean section. In India, female sterilisation accounts for 37.3% of all methods of family planning.

Health care justice and its implications for current policy of a mandatory waiting period for elective tubal sterilization.

Tubal sterilization during the immediate postpartum period is 1 of the most common forms of contraception in the United States. This time of the procedure has the advantage of 1-time hospitalization, which results in ease and convenience for the woman. The US Collaborative Review of Sterilization Study indicates the high efficacy and effectiveness of postpartum tubal sterilization. Oral and written informed consent is the ethical and legal standard for the performance of elective tubal sterilization for permanent contraception for all patients, regardless of source of payment. Current health care policy and practice regarding elective tubal sterilization for Medicaid beneficiaries places a unique requirement on these patients and their obstetricians: a mandatory waiting period. This requirement originates in decades-old legislation, which we briefly describe. We then introduce the concept of health care justice in professional obstetric ethics and explain how it originates in the ethical concepts of medicine as a profession and of being a patient and its deontologic and consequentialist dimensions. We next identify the implications of health care justice for the current policy of a mandatory 30-day waiting period. We conclude that Medicaid policy allocates access to elective tubal sterilization differently, based on source of payment and gender, which violates health care justice in both its deontologic and consequentialist dimensions. Obstetricians should invoke health care justice in women's health care as the basis for advocacy for needed change in law and health policy, to eliminate health care injustice in women's access to elective tubal sterilization.

FIGO's ethical recommendations on female sterilisation will do more harm than good: a commentary.

The International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) Committee for the Ethical Aspects of Human Reproduction and Women's Health advises against tubal occlusion (TO) performed at the time of caesarean section (CS/TO) or following a vaginal delivery (VD/TO) if this sterilisation has not been discussed with the woman in an earlier phase of her pregnancy. This advice is neither in accordance with existing medical custom nor evidence based. Particularly in less-resourced locations, adherence to it would deny much wanted one-off sterilisation opportunities to hundreds of thousands of women, many of whom have no reliable contraceptive alternative. To be sure, a well-timed discussion in pregnancy about a potential peripartum TO is preferable and, if conducted as a matter of course (as the Committee appears to promote), would represent an enormous improvement on current practice. Earlier counselling has the advantage that it results in fewer women who regret having rejected the CS/TO or VD/TO option. However, there is no evidence that earlier counselling leads to a smaller proportion of regretted sterilisations. Consequently, where early TO counselling has been impossible, forgotten or deliberately omitted on pronatalist, traditional, financial, cultural or religious grounds, offering a perinatal sterilisation belatedly and in an unbiased, culturally sensitive manner is often verifiably better than not presenting that option at all, notably where high parity and uterine scars are particularly dangerous. Belated counselling, as will be demonstrated in this paper, saves many lives. The Committee's blanket rejection of belated counselling on perinatal sterilisation is therefore unjustified.

Stratified reproduction, family planning care and the double edge of history.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: There is a growing clinical consensus that Medicaid sterilization consent protections should be revisited because they impede desired care for many women. Here, we consider the broad social and ideological contexts for past sterilization abuses, beyond informed consent. RECENT FINDINGS: Throughout the US history, the fertility and childbearing of poor women and women of color were not valued equally to those of affluent white women. This is evident in a range of practices and policies, including black women's treatment during slavery, removal of Native children to off-reservation boarding schools and coercive sterilizations of poor white women and women of color. Thus, reproductive experiences throughout the US history were stratified. This ideology of stratified reproduction persists today in social welfare programs, drug policy and programs promoting long-acting reversible contraception. SUMMARY: At their core, sterilization abuses reflected an ideology of stratified reproduction, in which some women's fertility was devalued compared to other women's fertility. Revisiting Medicaid sterilization regulations must therefore put issues of race, ethnicity, class, power and resources - not just informed consent - at the center of analyses.

Adding injury to injury: ethical implications of the Medicaid sterilization consent regulations.

The need for contraceptive and family planning services is often unmet, especially among lower-income women. However, the history of the provision of these services is fraught with coercion and mistrust: in 1979, in response to forced sterilization practices among doctors working with poor and minority populations, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare imposed regulations on the informed consent process for Medicaid recipients requesting sterilization. The government mandated, among other requirements, a 30-day waiting period between consent and surgery and proscribed laboring women from providing consent. Initially intended to prevent the exploitation of poor women, these rules have instead become a barrier to many women receiving strongly desired, effective, permanent contraception. More critically, the regulations are ethically flawed: by preventing women from accessing needed family planning services, the Medicaid consent rules violate the standards of beneficence and nonmaleficence; by treating publically insured women differently from privately insured women, they fail the justice standard; and by placing constraints on women's free choice of contraceptive methods, they run afoul of the autonomy standard. The current federal sterilization consent regulations warrant revising. The new rules must simultaneously reduce barriers to tubal ligation while safeguarding the rights of women who have historically suffered mistreatment at the hands of the medical profession. These goals could best be obtained through a combined approach of improved clinician ethics education and a new standardized sterilization consent policy, which applies to all women and which abolishes the 30-day waiting period and the prohibition on obtaining consent in labor.

Family planning in Brazil: why not tubal sterilisation during childbirth?

Sterilisation is the most desired method of contraception worldwide. In 1996, the Brazilian Congress approved a family planning law that legitimised female and male sterilisation, but forbade sterilisation during childbirth. As a result of this law, procedures currently occur in a clandestine nature upon payment. Despite the law, sterilisations continue to be performed during caesarean sections. The permanence of the method is an important consideration; therefore, information about other methods must be made available. Tubal sterilisation must not be the only choice. We argue that review of this restriction will not contribute to the increase in caesarean sections but will allow for greater sterilisation choice for men and women.