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08th Jul 2018

Woman explains why she opted to get sterilised at 31-years-old

Jade Hayden

A woman has explained why she decided to get sterilised at 31-years-old.

Gwynn MacKellen has said that she never wanted to have children due to climate change. So, to ensure that she never could, she opted to undergo a sterilisation procedure.

Speaking to Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield on This Morning this week, MacKellen said that she wanted to save the planet.

She said that some research has shown that having a lot of children increases a person’s carbon footprint, so she opted not to have any.

MacKellen first tried to get her partners to have vasectomies until one of them suggested that she should get sterilised instead.

“None of them would do it,” the recycling consultant said.

“So, my current partner said ‘well if it’s so important to you, why don’t you do it yourself? Why don’t you get sterilised?’ So, I started looking into it.”

Eventually, MacKellen found a doctor who would carry on the procedure and by the age of 31, she was sterile.

She does emphasise though that she doesn’t judge anybody who does want to have children.

“I don’t want to judge somebody else. It’s merely a personal decision,” she said.

“For me, I would feel bad bringing another person into the world.

“All of the other choices that you can make are very, very small in comparison because once you create that person they have their own effects, and they may have offspring and they may have offspring. It’s the impact of people.”

This Morning viewers did not understand MacKellen’s logic though, and instead began asking what would happen if everybody in the world decided to get sterilised too.

An unlikely scenario, but Twitter lets people say anything.