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Tubal sterilization or vasectomy: how do married couples make the choice?
W B Miller1, R N Shain, D J Pasta
1Transnational Family Research Institute, Palo Alto, California.
Objective:
To examine the relative importance of husband, wife, and couple factors as determinants of sterilization method choice.
Design:
Married couples seeking sterilization interviewed before surgery and again 1 year later.
Setting:
Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program subscribers seeking care at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital, Santa Clara, California.
Participants:
Two hundred married women seeking a tubal sterilization and their husbands and 200 married men seeking a vasectomy and their wives.
Interventions:
None.
Main Outcome Measures:
Sterilization method chosen.
Results:
In a logistic regression model, nine predictor variables correctly classified 94.9% of 395 couples (P less than 0.000).
Conclusions:
The choice of a sterilization method is achieved primarily through processes that involve both spouses. The motivations of both husband and wife, their mutual influence and communication, their present pattern of contraceptive use, and what they know about the satisfactions or dissatisfactions of other people who have had sterilizations are all factors that should be taken into account when the clinician helps a patient make the method-choice decision.