Should young women — in their 20s, with no children — be permitted to have the ultimate in birth control...

... sterilization?

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists weighed in on the topic last year with an updated policy statement on the benefits and risks of sterilization. The statement concludes that it's both a safe and effective means of permanent birth control. "Women who have completed their childbearing are candidates for sterilization," it says — without elaborating on what, precisely, that means. Does it refer to women who have already had a child, or several, and have now decided they're done? Or could that category also include an 18-year-old woman who has determined she's "completed" before ever getting started?

A major area of focus for ACOG, and the OB-GYNs it seeks to counsel, is the question of regret....

Via Metafilter, where somebody says: 

Kinda don't get why this is so controversial - there's nothing like the same sort of outrage over guys getting their tubes tied, even if they do it young.

(I joke, of course I know that endemic sexism is why.)

And somebody responds:

I think it's worth saying out loud, nevertheless: the patriarchy values women primarily on the basis of their ability to rear children and provide sexual pleasure to men. A young woman wanting her tubes tied is explicitly refusing to cooperate with her assigned role, and that is not looked kindly upon by the men who take it upon themselves to regulate women's bodies.

Should young minds be making such permanent decisions? Here's a BBC article "Is 25 the new cut-off point for adulthood?"

"Neuroscience has made these massive advances where we now don't think that things just stop at a certain age, that actually there's evidence of brain development well into early twenties and that actually the time at which things stop is much later than we first thought," says [child psychologist Laverne] Antrobus.

One usually sees this sort of expert opinion in the context of discussions of criminal sentencing, but it sprang to my mind as I read about a woman "explicitly refusing to cooperate with her assigned role" and resisting "the men who take it upon themselves to regulate women's bodies." That sounds as though it might be a somewhat immature way of thinking about your personal life, a temporary stage that you might develop beyond. But the decision to have a child is also permanent, and we completely accept young minds making that decision, and tubal ligation can be reversed (and IVF is also still possible).