Choosing to have children is a huge decision. And while a couple does usually make that decision together, only the person who can get pregnant can make the final decision. Pregnancy is a life-changing experience, and writer Mary Leavines knew that. During her first marriage, she chose to have major surgery to avoid getting pregnant.
But then everything changed. Her husband, whose child she didn’t want, came out as gay. After their relationship ended, she had to sit with her choice and the feelings that came with it.
She firmly didn’t want to have kids with her husband.
In an essay for HuffPost, Leavines shared the experience she had avoiding getting pregnant. She explained that her husband was her college sweetheart and a devout Catholic who made her convert before marriage. Because she was adhering to Catholic doctrine, she couldn’t use most forms of birth control. Instead she had to track her period and fertility other ways. But then she got pregnant and had a miscarriage.
“I was relieved,” she wrote of the miscarriage. “Both because it was over, and because I wasn’t pregnant.” It was then she realized she didn’t want to be a mother.
“‘I don’t want to be a mother,’ I repeated to myself, as our marriage hung by a slim thread of obligation instead of desire,” she wrote. But as COVID lockdown continued, she had a new realization: “I don’t want to be a mother to his children.”
She knew she had to take drastic measures to make that happen.
After finding a new gynecologist, Leavines asked for a bilateral salpingectomy, the removal of her fallopian tubes. She made the request knowing that if she ever changed her mind, she could only have a child using IVF. To her surprise, her doctor didn’t offer any pushback, allowing her to get the surgery. The procedure was successful.
But she had no idea what was to come next.
After having her fallopian tubes removed, Mary Leavines explained that her husband told her he was gay.
“When the word ‘divorce’ split the air between us, I rested a hand on my abdomen, over the three raw little scars from the procedure, and crashed back into my body,” she wrote. “Regret pooled into my belly, and stayed there.”
“I knew then — with the kind of clarity only hindsight gives you — that it had been my choice,” she wrote of the procedure. “I had other choices: I didn’t have to gnaw off my own foot to escape the vise of my failing marriage.”
After remarrying, she felt differently.
In 2024, Leavines remarried. And for a time, she and her second husband considered having a child. “I found in-vitro fertilization providers,” she explained. “I still had choices available to me, despite the choice I had made in 2020. The vise had not snapped shut on them yet.”
Ultimately, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and stricter rules about IVF, miscarriage, and abortion in many areas of the country, made Leavines decide not to have a child. But it was her choice always.
