An anonymous philosopher recounts her struggle to convince her male doctors that she was, in fact, okay with a procedure that would leave her infertile. In the end, she got approval only after visiting a female physician:
The attitude of most of the doctors I dealt with made me feel like my preference for childlessness was somehow unnatural, and shouldn’t be given the same respect as most women’s preference for having children. And what upsets me most about this, on reflection, is not what happened to me specifically, but what must surely happen to many women like me. I’m fortunate – I’ve never wanted children, and so in this case the needs of my body didn’t conflict with my preferences. But there are so many women in similar situations who do want children very much. I suspect that these women feel a lot of pressure – sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle – to forge ahead fearlessly in their attempts to get pregnant, and to view adoption as a distant second-best.
She follows up to share the consequences of her choice, concluding:
My partner and I are a family. We are a childless family, but that doesn’t make our family any less real or legitimate. The implication that people who don’t have children don’t have families – don’t have parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, partners, friends, pets – is beyond insulting. People have sometimes clarified their comment by saying that they were talking about a "nuclear family" (whatever that means). But just as I have an extended family, I also have a nuclear family. We are simply a family of two, rather than some n greater than two. Likewise, people without children and without romantic partners have nuclear families just as much as I do – those families are simply composed a little differently than my own. Whatever child-bearing abilities infertile women may lack, they do not lack families.
The Dish 