I Had My Fallopian Tubes Removed To End My Marriage. My Then-Husband’s Reaction Shocked Me.

In the summer of 2020, while the virus raged and my marriage folded in and collapsed in slow motion upon itself, I decided that I would become infertile.

My husband sat next to me in the waiting room before I was wheeled away, surprisingly good-natured about it all, even taking a selfie of us for posterity.

I was relieved. He was my high school sweetheart and a fervent Catholic who had insisted I convert before we were married right out of college. He had been vocally against me using any form of birth control for years, but I didn’t question his sudden ambivalence.

My first gynecologist, also a Catholic, was recommended to me by my mother-in-law, who worked at the same hospital. Like my husband, he also rebuked my desire to prevent pregnancy. One year into my marriage, I asked him for an IUD. The next, an implant. After each request, he demurred: “You’re healthy, and doing so well with natural family planning,” he said in rebuffing me, referring to the method I’d been using to prevent pregnancy.

It was a complicated process riddled with uncertainty. Each morning, I took my temperature and charted it next to my other observations; a sharp uptick in temperature meant I was nearing my follicular phase, and the risk of pregnancy was high. To verify that evidence, I would use my fingers to explore the texture, position, and fluids emanating from my cervix, to predict whether ovulation was imminent enough for my husband and I to need to abstain from sex. This divination worked for about two years — and then I missed a period.

In 2018, I miscarried in our bathroom. The cramps roared through me in a way they never had before, and I passed thick, brown blood and membranous tissue into the toilet.

“It’s just a period, though, right?” My husband had asked — almost begged. “If you’re miscarrying, then we need to collect it and bury the baby. I’ll call the priest.”

“Don’t, don’t,” I wept, hunched over my knees, naked, sweating, shivering. It was so early that I hadn’t even gotten a definitively positive pregnancy test yet; I knew I was pregnant only from my own intuition, and then, the agony. When it was finished, I flushed away the last of it and sat on the tiled bathroom floor, slick-skinned and floating. I relished the feeling of the cool tile, and I was relieved. Both because it was over, and because I wasn’t pregnant.

I don’t want to be a mother, I realized, hovering pleasantly against the ceiling, above and apart.

It was the first original idea I’d had for myself.

I left the Catholic gynecologist and ordered birth control online.

I left the Church. My husband — after consulting with our priest to see if an annulment was possible — begrudgingly stayed at my side and cast long, hangdog glances my way when he went to Sunday Mass alone.

I don’t want to be a mother, I repeated to myself, as our marriage hung by a slim thread of obligation instead of desire. When Covid reached us, and we were locked into our home together, working remotely at opposite ends of our little two-bedroom cottage in Baton Rouge, I had a new thought: I don’t want to be a mother to his children.

The implication — that I may want to be a mother to someone else’s children — was lost to the roiling uncertainty between us. Trapped, trapped, trapped, my racing mind thought — as I heard him type, and as he shirked lockdown procedures to attend weekly Mass, no matter how much I begged him not to go. His choice wasn’t one of animosity towards me; he was obligated to perform Catholicism in ways I didn’t yet understand. Still, I waited for our fever to set in.

The birth control, which made me depressed and foggy, no longer felt like enough protection. I took pregnancy tests every month. My breath hitched every time I flipped them over to see the results.

I couldn’t leave him — that felt impossible in ways I couldn’t explain — but I couldn’t be a mother, either.

Between those two impossibilities, I saw a thin sliver of choice. I found a new gynecologist and, when Covid restrictions cooled enough to allow non-emergency visits, I sat on her exam table and requested that she remove my fallopian tubes, a procedure called a bilateral salpingectomy.

I had pronounced the name of it in front of the mirror that morning, slowly and decisively, practicing, readying myself. The surgery meant that my tubes would be removed, not tied. It was irreversible, which meant that if I ever reneged on the decision, in-vitro fertilization would be my only option to become pregnant.

I was 26, and didn’t have children. Most gynecologists wouldn’t even consider a permanent sterilization procedure for someone like me. I was prepared to defend myself as I never had before.

“Sure,” she said, her eyes understanding and non-judgmental over her mask. “When would you like to get on the calendar?”

I froze in shock, and then, I collapsed. I’d expected to have to fight for it, I told her when she handed me a box of tissues. I’d been fighting for so long to feel in control of my own body.

There were only a few more skirmishes between me and that sharp relief of self-imposed infertility. First, I had to tell my husband. Braced for pushback, I told him that I had been approved for the surgery, and I was going to do it. I didn’t leave room for argument, though that was unnecessary. 

After staring at me for a long moment, with a detached, unreadable expression on his face, he shrugged and said, “Seems like you’ve already made your choice.” There was no fight left in him.

Floating on my high of newfound independence — the outside validation that I deserved to take control of my reproductive choices — I didn’t question his distance, or what it meant for the future of our marriage. For the first time in my life, I truly believed that I was considering only my desires… so I no longer cared.

With that hurdle crossed, there was a flurry of pre-op appointments and bloodwork. There was one more appointment with my new doctor during which she read a list of questions meant to provoke second thoughts, if I had any. I steeled myself against them and passed. 

Officially cleared for surgery, I endured an early Covid test that involved swabs being inserted so forcefully into my nostrils, it felt as though they were pressed up against the backs of my eye sockets.

And then, on May 7, 2020, I was wheeled into the OR. About an hour later, they wheeled me back out, freshly barren and groggy.

I hadn’t eaten anything since midnight the previous night, but when I woke, I couldn’t stop dry-heaving. A nurse jabbed something into my thigh to end the nausea. I shook, insurmountably cold, and my husband stared at me from the corner of the room. I’d never reacted to anesthesia that way — my whole body rebuking the invasion, trembling and uncontrollable and somehow apart from me. I floated over my body, disassociating from it as it quaked, and I stayed there.

Three months later, my Catholic husband sat me down at our dining room table and explained that he had been gay, and closeted, his entire life. He had come to understand the truth that I’d been ignoring for years: He needed to be alone so that he could become endeared to himself. 

It was the beginning of a long walk for both of us — a parallel path that spiraled inward, then unfolded. Years later, my ex realized that she was trans and I realized the degree to which I had also ignored my own knowing.

But first, there was a reckoning. When the word “divorce” split the air between us, I rested a hand on my abdomen, over the three raw little scars from the procedure, and crashed back into my body.

Regret pooled into my belly, and stayed there. I cried on a second date when I told my next boyfriend about the surgery, and wept even harder when he told me it didn’t matter to him — that he just wanted me.

We would go out to dinner, and a screaming infant and its cooing mother would give me a singular moment of relief. Imagine, I thought. Imagine if you had one of those. You wouldn’t be free.

I decided to exercise that freedom, and in 2022, I sold my home and most of my belongings, quit my job in Baton Rouge, left my boyfriend, and walked the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. Somewhere in the Smoky Mountains, I realized that if the baby I’d miscarried had lived, I would have a three year old. I could see him toddling before me on the trail, dark-haired and beautiful, before disappearing into the mist. I followed him north for 2,200 miles.