Sterilization Consent Form: They Sign It, but Do They Understand It?

To obtain sterilization — a contraceptive method second in prevalence only to oral contraceptives in the U.S. — all Medicaid-insured women must sign a standardized consent form 30 days before the procedure. But do they understand what they are signing? Researchers evaluated the comprehensibility of the Title XIX-SCF Consent to Sterilization form (ninth-grade reading level) and a modified low-literacy version (sixth-grade reading level) of the consent form. Two blinded raters used the Readability and Processability Form (RPF), a validated informed-consent evaluation tool comprising five components shown in Table 1. Higher scores denote easier-to-understand documents.

Both versions of the consent form ask the signer to acknowledge that the ste…