My vasectomy
It’s OK if you don’t know what to say to me about it
A note: I’m going to talk in some detail about an outpatient surgery. If that sort of thing bothers you, skip to the 7th paragraph.
***
All in all, a minor procedure. An incision smaller than a penknife’s edge, two quick snips, some stitches. I was out the door in under an hour, ferried home by my wife to play videogames in bed.
The worst part was the needle that delivered the local anesthetic. The doctor had to jam it into my scrotum and root around for a second or two. I did not care for that. 1
The most surprising moment was when he took out a tool to cauterize the snipped ends of my vasa deferentia. I had read the literature and studied the diagrams, but nobody had warned me about this. I couldn’t feel much, but the smell and sight of rising smoke will not soon leave my memory.
As I lay semi-reclined, trying to let the prescribed dose of Ativan mellow me out, I made small talk. I asked the doctor how many vasectomies he had performed that morning; I think he said I was his third. I took comfort in how blasé he seemed about the whole process.
As of this past Friday, I can count myself among the 175,000 to 500,000-ish people who receive a vasectomy in the U.S. each year. That number is dwarfed by the number of people with ovaries who receive tubal ligations (700,000 or more per year, depending on which study you’re reading).
I am not trying to score any Male Feminist Points by saying this (but I’ll take them if you insist): A vasectomy is cheaper, less invasive, and more effective at preventing pregnancies than tubal ligation. If you and your partner are finished having kids or don’t want kids at all, it seems like the better option in most cases. I have decent insurance and the procedure cost $60 out of pocket.
That’s enough medical talk for now. In the 5 days since my vasectomy, I’ve been thinking about it as a rite of passage for which there is no commonly accepted ceremony. Doctors have been performing routine vasectomies as a means of birth control since around World War II, but there still aren’t any scripts or pleasantries we’re supposed to exchange. I explained my day off to a coworker yesterday, and she weighed her words for a beat before saying, “Congratulations? No, that’s not right.” I wouldn’t know what to say either.
How to mark this small but significant turn in the road? I’ve been marveling at the gift of birth control and family planning. Like so much reproductive science in this country, the vasectomy has a violent history. Eugenicists and criminal “reformers” promoted it as a means of forced sterilization in prisons. But today the voluntary vasectomy presents us with an unprecedented level of choice about the course of our adulthoods and the size of our families.
Those choices are allowed and denied along the same old prejudicial lines. Notably, not one medical professional asked me if I’d gotten my wife’s permission for my vasectomy. My abundance of choice is a privilege, and it requires me to fight for the choice of others.
At the same time, my vasectomy has me feeling sentimental. It’s a hard stop on a phase of life. We have three beautiful children in our home now who are old enough to talk and sing and hug us back, but we won’t be having any more babies. We gave away the cribs. We turned off a switch.
Our decision to stop having children bore some similarities to our decision, more than 8 years ago, to start having them. There were practical considerations — we’re out of bedrooms, we don’t want to spread ourselves too thin — but to me at least, those felt like afterthoughts. The urge came first: I wanted to bring children into the world, and then I wanted to stop.
I was getting coffee the other day with a friend who is thinking about having kids, and he asked a basic question: Why have kids at all?
We talked through the practical considerations: Childcare is wildly expensive in this country, and medical bills could bankrupt you if anything goes wrong. Parenting is a whole new world of anxiety about dangers you’d never considered before.
But deciding to have children is not like deciding to take a new job or move to a new city. It’s a decision in its own category, involving not only the needs of you and your partner, but also the needs of a hypothetical person you’ve never met.
As we talked, I remembered the old anti-natalist / pro-natalist arguments I hacked my way through in my 20s, in roughly this order:
How can you bring children into a world of suffering? This is a fair point, but bracketing off the inherent suffering of existence for now, 2 I think we have the means to protect them from the worst of it.
Bringing another human life onto this planet is hastening the disaster of climate change. I think the burden of guilt lies more heavily on fossil fuel executives and the political servants of capital than on any of several billion people deciding to procreate. And ultimately, while this might sound boorish, I think an earth without humans isn’t worth saving.
Bearing children is our God-given purpose! I’m not counting on my kids to plow my fields or defend my camp from marauders, so I don’t think the “quiverfull” argument applies here.
Smart and virtuous people should have more kids. Raise them to change the world! Our children are not our moral prostheses. If you want to fix the world, you should do it yourself.
It’s not selfish to have kids, and it’s not selfish to not have kids either. I don’t believe in a cosmic ledger or a karmic balance sheet. We are free — terrifyingly, dizzyingly free.
We chose to have children, and they cracked us open. We have felt love, joy, and fear that we would not have felt otherwise. We have three people in our care who would not exist if not for our act of will. “How strange it is to be anything at all!” How strange it is to cause someone to be.
And how strange it is to stop. I feel a tug of melancholy about my vasectomy, but I haven’t felt regret. I held my children closer as I read their bedtime story last night, knowing that each milestone with them would be the last. I’m savoring the days differently than I did last week.
***
I couldn’t figure out how to work this into the newsletter, but one of my favorite pieces of Charleston history is that our minor league baseball team tried raffling off a free vasectomy for Father’s Day in 1997 and caught heat from the local Catholic Diocese about it. I found the original AP story and it’s a fun read.
Brutal South is a free weekly newsletter and occasional podcast about class struggle, parenting, education, liberation, Christian existentialism, brutalist architecture, and heavy metal in the American South. Sign up at the paid tier ($5/month) to support my work and get access to some exclusive content. I’ll also mail you some cool stickers I had printed at a union shop last year.
Apple Podcasts // Spotify Podcasts // Twitter // Bookshop // Bandcamp
Reading up on the subject afterward, I found out that some doctors offer needle-free vasectomies. So don’t let this part scare you off!
To cause life is to cause suffering, but it is also to cause joy.
I really enjoyed reading about this from a male perspective - thank you!
There really should be a ritual or ceremonial aspect around this. I'm usually pretty reserved until I find out someone has had a vasectomy, then tend to really overshare. I'll limit myself here, but will add what I asked the first time someone mentioned the Xanax they took for it, which was, "What? That was never presented as an option to me." And I could have used it.