Regarding Laura Briggs' article about sterilization in Puerto Rico, I find that the way they determine whether or not sterilization is "justified" is inherently flawed in that they do not factor in the social and economic distinctions of different classes. There was one mention that wealthier women tend to favor hospital sterilization (156). Of course one might say wealthier women will express such sentiment in such a study; they have the means to acquire it with little risk to the financial situation of their families... A poorer woman on the other hand might have to determine whether potentially having a child even at the risk of her own health and happiness would be better for the family economically (another helping hand, or $25 saved from operation procedure, or simply the will of her husband), or whether she should put her own well-being and desires at the forefront. Judging people's reactions to one question, in this case "is sterilization good or bad?", does not take into account the variety of life experiences of the subjects. Which simply highlights the fact that reproduction is and has always been a personal issue that should not be placed on a distant and impersonal public platform for government dis/approval.


I also laughed heartily at Martin's article. I study the aging of stem cells in fruit fly testes and I have remarked occasionally how very interesting they are. But this is not because I value males over females, but rather because their testes are approximately 1/3 the size of their body which goes to show where all of their prerogatives lie. If one were to compare fruit fly ovaries with testes, there would be no "derogatory" terms used for females, for their eggs mature much the same as sperm mature, and there is no preset egg cache in the body waiting to deposit over the individual's lifespan. When Martin rails about comparisons of "wastefulness," then, her characterization of females being conservative and sparing are not entirely correct. In fact to focus an entire argument on human anatomy without considering the biological systems of other gendered organisms is sort of silly, because animals are classically studied in far more detail and were dissected centuries earlier than humans due to moral squeamishness against dissecting human beings. Also, I can't imagine a Martin-esque feminist's description of the fertilization process. Maybe it would go something like "The egg sailed valiantly down the fallopian tube, while some blindly flailing tadpoles swam in the opposite direction; eventually the feebly groping sperm collided with the egg and a baby was conceived..."