US Interest in Vasectomies Rising Sharply in Wake of High Court Ending Federal Abortion Rights

Mass demonstrations have followed the end of federal abortion rights in the United States, and although some states have moved to protect abortion access, in large swaths of the country early termination of a pregnancy will become increasingly hard to do legally.

As a consequence, many men are rushing to get the procedure done in order to keep their partners from becoming pregnant. However, there are problems with vasectomies being held up as an alternative to aborting a pregnancy.

According to the Washington Post, urologists have seen a sharp increase in the number of vasectomy requests since the Dobbs vs Jackson decision was announced last month. One Florida-based doctor said he went from getting four or five vasectomy requests per day to between 12 and 18 per day.

“It was very, very noticeable Friday, and then the number that came in over the weekend was huge and the number that is still coming in far exceeds what we have experienced in the past,” Doug Stein, a urologist in the Tampa suburbs known as the “Vasectomy King” for his advocacy of the procedure, told the Post for a Wednesday story.

“Many of the guys are saying that they have been thinking about a vasectomy for a while, and the Roe v. Wade decision was just that final factor that tipped them over the edge and made them submit the online registration,” he said, referring to the 1973 ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide, but which the high court overturned in the Dobbs decision last month.

Google search data shows a spike in searches for “vasectomy” in early May, following the publication of the Supreme Court’s draft of the Dobbs decision, followed by a massive increase of at least four times the normal search volume after Dobbs was announced on June 24.

Those searches increased in every state in the union, but saw the sharpest increase in those states with so-called “trigger laws,” which had sat passive for years but immediately took effect when Roe was overturned, banning abortions in those states. Utah, Idaho, Texas and Oklahoma were among the highest, alongside other conservative-dominated states like Montana and North Dakota.

About half a million men get vasectomies each year in the US, according to the New York Times. The procedure is a form of birth control and involves severing the vas deferens, a pair of tubes that connect the testes, which produce sperm, to the seminal vesicles, which produce semen. It renders men unable to impregnate a woman during sexual intercourse, although they will continue to ejaculate like before. The entire procedure takes just 10 minutes.

A Viable Alternative to Abortion?

While in pop culture it’s commonly referred to as being “fully reversible,” Planned Parenthood notes: “Vasectomies are meant to be permanent - so they usually can’t be reversed. You should only get a vasectomy if you’re 100% positive you don’t want to be able to get someone pregnant for the rest of your life.”

A popular internet meme since the abortion crisis began suggests that men should be required to get vasectomies, which would only be reversed if they are found to be acceptable father figures. However, historians have cautioned that at not-so-distant times in US history, the government did just that to control the reproduction of Black, indigenous and disabled people, so it might not be the most progressive of ideas.

“The US has done mandatory vasectomies for men it saw as unfit to be parents already. In fact, it was policy in some parts of the US for most of the twentieth century. It disproportionately affected Black, Latinx, and disabled people,” Georgia Grainger, a Phd. researcher from the Center for the Social History of Health and Healthcare in Glasgow, Scotland, wrote in a popular Twitter thread last week.

She further noted a number of problems with relying on vasectomies to prevent pregnancy, ranging from the fact that vas deferens can heal to the inability to distinguish between someone who has and has not had the procedure done, leaving women at the mercy of men’s honesty. In the case of medical situations such as ectopic pregnancies, when the fertilized egg embeds itself in a part of the reproductive tract other than the uterus, an abortion will still be required.

“Vasectomies do not help in cases of wanted pregnancies that need to be ended for medical reasons, unwanted pregnancies where a future pregnancy might be wanted, young people, non-monogamous people, pregnancies by rape, or pregnancies by BC [birth control] failure (since vasectomy can also fail),” she added.

On the other side of things, women are stocking up on birth control and abortion pills in the wake of the ruling as well. Pharmacies and online retailers such as Amazon and Walmart have seen a 3,000% increase in demand and have been forced to place order caps on emergency contraceptive pills.

“Due to increased demand, at this time we are limiting purchases of Plan B contraceptive pills to three per customer,” a RiteAid spokesperson told Fortune on Tuesday. Also known as the “morning after” pill, Plan B prevents conception or prevents the fertilized egg from attaching to the uterine wall - a necessary step to beginning pregnancy.