Reduced Health Insurance Payments for Hospital Births Had a Bigger Impact on Sterilization Rates Than Correcting an Injustice

For decades, female sterilization has been one of the most common forms of birth control in the U.S.: 11.5% of U.S. women, ages 15-49, use female sterilization as their primary contraceptive method – nearly identical to the pill.

But the history of sterilization is also deeply entangled with coercion in the form of racial targeting, invalid consent and state control.

As a health economist and a political scientist, we wanted to better understand what factors influence women’s choices around contraception and sterilization. Our recent study found that a policy change in the 1990s which reduced the length of hospital stays for women giving birth appears to have inadvertently had a more meaningful effect on female sterilization rates in the U.S. than a landmark civil rights intervention in the 1970s.