A spate of articles in progressive publications is claiming that American men are running to get vasectomies as access to abortion comes under fire.
According to the same two doctors, a documentarian, and a man who markets himself as “the Vasectomy King”—there has been a 15% uptick in vasectomy appointments since September 1st, when Texas’s near-total abortion ban went into effect. Curiously, each article mentions #WorldVasectomyDay, brainchild of “the Vasectomy King” Doug Stein.
Several questions sprung to mind reading this news.
Is this really a trend beyond a minority of liberal American men who enjoy making a spectacle of their feminist politics, hungry as always for good boy points? If it is a trend, then who are these men getting these vasectomies? How can we be so sure that “progressive politics” are what’s driving their decision-making process?
We learn about happily married Andy Gress, interviewed by The Washington Post, who scheduled his vasectomy after his fourth child. That’s hardly the radical move the Post tries to frame it as. But who else is joining him in this symbolic gesture for women’s right? My intuition is people like him; men who chose to get a vasectomy for a host of other reasons, like heritable diseases they don’t intend to pass on. But who knows? It’s difficult information to come by, and certainly not included in any of the current reporting.
There just isn’t a lot of meat to this story. A single Texan urologist had an increase in vasectomies, one family internist from Boston backed him up. But no larger scale statistics. We learn about Doug Stein, though, who’s famous for his pro-vasectomy marketing campaign, replete with billboards.
Eventually I couldn’t help but wonder, is this secretly a PR campaign for World Vasectomy Day? I’m not being facetious, either. Every hashtag holiday, from #WorldAIDSDay to #TransDayofVisibility, is sponsored by some organization and receives a public relations campaign, where publicists email journalists about potential ways to build a story around it.
To me, this seemed like the most likely culprit.
The WaPo article, at least, spends a most of the piece making the argument that women carry an unfair burden when it comes to preventing unwanted pregnancy—the so-called “increase in vasectomies” seemed like a launch pad for this idea. Which makes me think that this discourse cycle isn’t about a real behavioral change at all, it’s about advertising male sterilization. It’s not just for the ladies, gentlemen.
Assuming there’s something more here than a cynical ploy to market a medical procedure, what’s most interesting in this conversation is that the frame is exclusively on this idea of personal accountability. The role of sex never changes.
Sex remains a static, neutral activity, that may end in unwanted consequences if people don’t behave “responsibly.”
But never does anyone stop and think: Maybe we should renegotiate the value we place on sex instead of sterilize ourselves.
Definitely a Submarine PR campaign. PG has written about these: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Obviously it’s a ploy. It would have been more obvious as such if we saw the whole process in the old-fashioned way, with a PR flak at a messy desk and a wacky angle on behalf of someone with something to sell calling a reporter with the pitch. If this was about gas prices, or using the word “vibes” more, or some other topical whatsit, it would be the exact same thing.