Race, female sterilization and regret in northeastern Brazil

Abstract

Female sterilization was a polcmic theme in thc beginning of the nineties in Brazil and among black communities. The incrcasing risk of regretting this practice was considered its main counterpart. In thc prcsent empirical work, we try to dcmonstrate this is not a well-founded argument in the contcxt of extreme postem, of Brazilian Northcast. Here the stcrilization practice seems to work as a protection to the women's health and not as regret risk. Within the interviewed women, most of them black, the sterilization resulted from a voluntary decision rather than an imposition. Bcginning with a study of the repro¬ductive trajectory of 41 sterilized women from a low income neighborhood in Salvador, Bahia (from a 120 domicile survey), and reflecting about the meaning of the term regret in focal group of 8 sterilized women, the work points out the necessity to restate and rethink the way of conceiving and to measure the regret phenomena.