Last year, when a woman in Berryville, Arkansas went into the hospital to deliver her baby by Cesarean section, she did not request or authorize her doctor to also perform a tubal ligation. But that minor detail didn’t stop Dr. Shirolyn Ruth Moffett from doing just that. Dr. Moffett claims that she surgically ensured that this woman would never have another child because she feared that the patient’s uterus would burst if she ever got pregnant again.
Not only did Dr. Moffett perform this procedure without permission, she failed to inform the woman after the fact and made no notation of what she had done on her medical chart.
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I personally think this happens a great deal, but the doctors are able to convince the patient after-the-fact that it is what’s best for them, so the patient just goes along with it. I have heard many stories if not where the doctor has succeeded, where they have made attempts.
Myself included.
I had one doctor who kept writing “tubal ligation” on my chart and never brought it to my attention until I saw another doctor in the practice and she asked me about it. I said that was a mistake. I saw my regular doctor later, and oddly, it was on my chart again. I told my doctor I was 22, and had two children, and didn’t want a tubal. She told me I had too many children, and ordered me “don’t you come back to this office again until you decide a method of birth control for after you have this baby!”
Oddly, I went back to that group with the next pregnancy (insurance, they were supposedly anti-abortion, I was young and stupid), and the same thing happened.
How many women did this tactic work with?