What a wonderful option for women out there who are desiring to have more children after a tubal ligation.
The suggestion are highly appreciated

I had taken your comment as support for that view. I apologize; I see now that you just didn’t read the same intent into those comments as I did. While I think it’s important to note they are not the only or main reason casual sex is common in our society, I agree that the feminist movement has played an important role in that trend. I found ‘Becca’s comments on that role to be insightful.

1. getting carried away with the idea that motherhood is a horrible burden that prevents a woman from being a person. There’s some truth to it: Pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding are physically stressful and require adjustment of one’s schedule. Many women enjoy their careers and would rather not be stay-at-home mothers. BUT there are millions of examples of women continuing careers in parallel with motherhood and millions of examples of stay-at-home mothers being involved in the outside world through paid or volunteer work. Looking down on women who use the full range of abilities of their reproductive organs actually is a form of misogyny, IMO, a fear of femaleness as it really fully is.

2. believing that because there was an era in which children were considered the property of their fathers, now it’s time for an era in which children are considered the property of their mothers. This is no better for the children, and it discourages men from being responsible fathers.

Certainly not all feminists think like this, but these are the general trends I’ve seen. I watched them unfold through the ’80s as a kid reading my mom’s Ms. Magazine.

The situation now, the “Sex and the City” type attitude toward sex, reminds me of a quote from Fran Lebowitz complaining about the direction of feminism in about 1993: “We want girls to be interested in sports, so that everyone can be an idiot.” It seems that, rather than developing healthy and reasonable ways of balancing the pleasurable, reproductive, and emotional-bonding aspects of sex, many women have decided to adopt the playboy attitude traditional among (some) men. So now “everyone” is an idiot.

I’m old enough to remember when feminism was VERY big on stressing that men should not treat women like “sex objects.”

Sadly, somewhere along the way, such “feminism” went off the rails and embraced the objectification of the human person in sex, effectively reducing women in many respects to playthings to be used (and, of course, something to be discarded when one is done with her).

Regardless, feminism is why I can be an engineer. Feminism is why I can vote. Feminism is why I have the right to not be beaten by my husband, not even with a stick smaller in diameter than his thumb. These things have had a tremendous positive impact on my life.

The implications that “what women’s lib has done to an entire generation of women” is completely negative in nature, and that all of women’s lib is a “mistake” really bother me.

And, again, not Catholics in particular, but society has certainly viewed pregnancy as a punishment for sinning women. A real eye-opener for me was the book The Girls Who Went Away: it is about the experiences of women coerced into surrendering their children for adoption. It covers the time period 1940-1960, not very long ago at all.

Like knit_tgz and ‘Becca, I’ve been surprised by people’s belief in the infallibility of birth control. I had added a statement in the Wikipedia condom article about pregnancy sometimes happening even with perfect use, no slippage, no breakage. I thought this was obvious. But a couple of people argued with me pretty vehemently about it!

I complained to my husband about these unreasonable people on the internet – and he agreed with them! (This is the man who was taught in high school sex-ed that condoms fail one out of every six times they are used. “Like Russian roulette.” That untruth was obviously ineffective in conveying that condoms are fallible – I’d like to see more approaches like those knit_tgz described.)

I did eventually find studies to support this: “Even if no breakage or slippage is observed, 1–2% of women will test positive for semen residue after intercourse with a condom.” Hopefully having that in a widely-read article is a small step in combating that kind of “contraceptive mentality”.

I think your coworker experienced much stronger consequences than many men prior to the 1980s invention of DNA paternity testing: he was held at least financially responsible by society, and forced into an (at least financial) decades-long relationship with the mother. The spread of more effective birth control methods and the availability of abortion have enabled some women to approach the attitude toward sex some men have had for millennia. That women can do this is new, but the attitude itself is very old. It certainly can’t be blamed on women’s lib.

It’s a complicated issue affected by a lot of factors, so I’m not sure where our society is headed on the issue of sex and procreation. But I hope it’s in a direction of pressuring both sexes to take sex more seriously.

I have a button somewhere that says “Sex is the leading cause of children” people just don’t seem to get it until it happens to them. I really should have a bumper sticker made…