A Vasectomy for Every Newborn Boy
By: Marik Hazan
Tags: Abortion, Politics, Baby, Policy, Family

Population growth is undeniably the most pressing issue of our time. Resource scarcity, environmental destruction, and all the problems that come along with these forces are growing at exponential rates because we haven’t figured out how to humanely limit our ability to reproduce.

We’ve made some very poor attempts. The One Child Policy left 100 Million women missing today because of prenatal gender selection and neglect of girls.

And when we look at the US, our population control strategies, systems, and innovations also disproportionately place the burden on women. Women are asked to have abortions, take pills that keep their hormones out of balance for years at a time. Women are disproportionately affected when their male partners decide to leave and are legally nearly completely responsible for the wellbeing of a child after birth.

But just because women don’t have autonomy in our current system doesn’t mean that we should adopt a solution where men lack it as well. A male focused solution should provide men with greater autonomy than they currently have.

40% of pregnancies in the US are unintended. That means close to half of the child bearing population didn’t make the choice. Neither men nor women have the ability to make the decision because our current forms of birth control are ineffective, inaccessible to a large fraction of the population, or simply undesirable to the average person.

But I hear you. A vasectomy might still feel like we’re going too far.

Then why don’t we consider that almost every baby boy born in the western, developed world already undergoes an operation shortly after birth. Circumcisions are irreversible, forever impact the child’s sexual organ making him less sensitive and decreasing sexual pleasure permanently. They also serve little to no purpose.

But a vasectomy is reversible. It does not alter hormone levels even when performed pre-pubesently. It is extremely simple and does not affect fertility rates for decades after it is performed. In short, this surgery has the ability to change the patient from a thoughtless reproduction engine into someone who must actively choose to reproduce. And it has nearly no negative externalities.

A vasectomy for every newborn boy is the safest way to change the default of humanity to a conscious model of reproduction.

A male focused approach would provide greater autonomy for millions of men to make the decision for themselves. It is also the only solution that so elegantly straddles both pro-life and pro-choice advocacy.

Of course, it is not the all inclusive answer. There are still gaps. The surgery is more complex pre-puberty because the vas deferens remain in the abdomen until adolescence. But this is a problem for our engineers, scientists, and doctors. This is a problem that can receive grant funding, can have entire labs dedicated to it, and can be rolled out in tandem with policy changes as the culture of the world shifts to accommodate this practice.

At first, this proposal will make anyone uncomfortable. But when put into the context of our practices today in population management we see that this solution provides greater autonomy, has fewer health ramifications, and provides an infrastructure of tangible steps and decisions that can be made to broaden our approach to solving our world’s most complex problems.