The cultural impetus for this shift appears to be Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the June 2022 decision with which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and took away the constitutional right to abortion in the United States. Since the ruling, there has been an uptick in the number of people scheduling vasectomies as well as a change in their reasons for doing so.
Dr. Kathleen Hwang, a urologist at Penn Medicine, has experienced this rising interest in vasectomy in her practice. Around the fall of 2022, she said, “the number of consult requests exponentially increased to where I needed to adjust my clinical practice to accommodate the increase in volume.”
Hwang was involved in a research study about men’s reasons for seeking vasectomies. She and her colleagues surveyed more than 300 men who sought vasectomies following June 2022, the time of the Dobbs ruling.
Thirty percent of respondents identified “sociopolitical issues,” which included the Dobbs decision, as an “important” or even “the most important” factor in their decision.
Patients who felt this way, Hwang explained, were often younger and single. They were also more likely to be child-free. Patients without children were five times more likely to say that sociopolitical issues influenced their decision, Hwang said.
“The fastest growing population of men interested in this method of contraception are men who are childless and younger men (under 30 years old),” Hwang told HuffPost.
In the survey, she said, “many of the patients provided feedback that their decision to proceed with a vasectomy was largely to reduce the burden on their female partner from either being on a current contraceptive and or to protect them from needing to ever consider an abortion.”
Interestingly, the survey found that men who considered sociopolitical reasons for having a vasectomy spent significant time thinking about their decision — an average of four years, or about twice as long as those who did not report sociopolitical influence.
“In the past, younger men or childless men were thought to be making more hasty decisions and would have regret around sterilization, but our data demonstrates that they spend a significant time considering vasectomy and are unlikely to have regret,” Hwang said.
Thomas, a 27-year-old who recently had a vasectomy, exemplifies this cultural shift in motivations.
“I personally have never wanted to have children in my life and have wanted a vasectomy since I was at least 22,” he told HuffPost. He was delayed by a lack of health insurance but also because he thought providers would question his decision.
“I was not very confident that any doctors would willingly perform the procedure on me, since I don’t have kids and I am fairly young,” he said.
The 2024 election results increased his resolve to seek out the procedure
“I have become increasingly pressed to get one recently because of the admin shift. If prenatal health care is becoming increasingly difficult to access, someone who doesn’t want a kid is naturally concerned that they will be forced to have one. That’s in my own self-preservation but also in the interest of protecting women and those who have uteruses, since pregnancy is a two-way street,” he said.
As for women’s feelings about men having vasectomies, it appears that at least some may feel relief to find a partner who has had one. A man named Jon told HuffPost he had the procedure done while he was married, shortly following the birth of his third child. He got divorced several years later, he said, and “when I started dating again it was apparently a ‘plus point’ for me.”
*Not his real name
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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