It’s Called Permanent Birth Control For a Reason!
June 25, 2006 by kate baggott
Filed under Mommy Extras
I’ve been struggling to contain my outrage over reports that men should have a sperm sample frozen before they have a vasectomy to protect their ability to have children with a new partner in case the current marriage should break up.
- “Vasectomy operations involve surgeons sealing the vas deferens, the tube that transports sperm from the testicles. Nearly 40,000 vasectomies are carried out in Britain each year, although 2,500 are reversed, often when a man wishes to have a family with a new partner,” reports the Guardian. “But a study of men who had a reversal operation found that their sperm were 10 times as likely to have genetic defects as sperm from men who had not had a vasectomy.”
Here are my knee-jerk reactions:
A vasectomy is called “permanent birth control” for a reason. It is supposed to be permanent. When couples with children divorce and re-couple, that does not end either parents’ committment to their existing progeny. While love is an infinite resource, money and attention are not.
What bothers me about these findings from a womens’ health perspective is that a vasectomy, compared to various kinds of female sterilisation, is a surgical walk in the park. Once a couple has decided that their family is big enough, after a woman has endured and survived childbirth, then her partner owes her the favour of not exposing her to the additional risks of invasive surgery.
Obviously, a vasectomy is a choice to made by men who truly love their wives and children. What is a frozen sperm sample before the procedure? Insurance against the end of love? A message to to mothers that their partners probably will throw them over for a younger model?
I agree but for somewhat different reasons. If he’s getting the vasectomy because he doesn’t feel able to care for additional children, then I agree with you that the operation should be permanent.
If he’s considering a vasectomy because she doesn’t want more children, but he can envision circumstance where he’d want more children, then maybe they should consider alternatives.
Regarding the potential of his having children without her: (1) If he lives longer than her, would it be wrong for him to remarry and have additional children? (2) If they differ strongly on wanting more children, will their marriage last? I don’t like people planning for divorce… but regard this as a symptom that the marriage won’t last.
I think if you have doubts about wanting more children, you don’t have permanent birth control.
That said, I find the “what if” scenario being presented to men rather dangerous. Tubals, the femail serilisation is so much more dangerous, but many men would still rather their wives be subjected to it than to sacrifice the “what if” and undergo a simple, non invasive procedure
I must disagree with the OP for a couple of reasons. A man does not “owe” his wife a vacectomy. It is his body.
I am dating a man whose wife made him get a vacetomy because she didn’t want to get pregnant again. She the divorced him 10 years later when he lost his job and couldn’t find another one in the same salary (sometimes she’ll tell him that if he was still making the same salary he would still be in the house). He didn’t want the divorce, she did. She now has a rich new boyfriend.
Thanks to this horrible woman, if this man and I do decide to get married we won’t be able to have a child together. He doesn’t want to go through more surgery and I am not sure if we could afford IVF (with sperm extraction) any way.