Relying on information from a national survey (Suplemento à Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios) conducted by the Brazilian census office (IBGE) in 1986, the article looks at data on the birth control methods used by Brazilian women between the ages of 15 and 54. Although family planning can be seen as a territory in which two spheres meet - the first being the political sphere itself, where the State defines the women who are destined to perpetuate the citizen and chooses those citizens who should be born and who deserve the use of the public assets, and the second being the private sphere, the sphere of the family and its internai economics, including symbolic resources - the text focuses on only one of the two. It examines the characteristics of birth control services as rendered by a State that was conceived with the attributes of liberalism and is by its very nature kept from enforcing an explicit birth control policy. Within this context, the accelerated expansion of sterilization and of its apparent disorder is intriguing: the spr«?ad of this mcthod sliows no correlation with the regional prevalence of illiteracy or poverty; rather, its expansion may in fact be detected in a particular geographical area while the method may be absent in another area with a similar socio-economic profile. The article is thus concerned with finding order in disorder and with understanding the replacement of the pill by tubal ligation as the most popular method for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy in Brazil.