Quite the column, 'Guardian'...
It is difficult to get a complete picture of vasectomy numbers and rates in the UK because of the way responsibility is split between secondary care (hospitals and clinics) and primary care (GPs), with a shift towards the latter doing the procedure in recent years. However, research from 2022 (which reviewed data for the previous 16 years) suggested that vasectomy rates in the UK have declined significantly.
And is that a problem, as we are being outbred by the invading hordes? The ‘Guardian’ clearly believes it is, as their columnist has written this piece. Though from the picture, it’s unclear how familiar he is with testosterone anyway…
One reason for this might be the way the procedure is discussed online, where negative but niche health outcomes are elevated. When I mentioned to the surgeon that I was feeling a little anxious, he said he had performed scores of vasectomies, and nothing had ever gone wrong. It was just that a handful of horror stories were out there in the world.
’A little anxious’ is, I suspect, this man’s natural state.
Urban myths inevitably circulate. One man in the comments under a video about vasectomies vows never to have one, as his friend did and “lost his sex drive”.
Ultimately, though, it was the cuts that did for the snip. The austerity years in Britain led to funding cuts for vasectomies, with some areas restricting them to “exceptional circumstances”.
I knew it'd somehow be all the fault of the Tories! While not mentioning that there seemed to be no such budgetary concerns with trying to change mentally ill men into facsimiles of women.
The vasectomy’s decline, like many other things in decline in the UK, is just one symptom of a general, long-term malaise.
What sort of malaise?
The phrase the surgeon used when asking for my consent for the operation was that I had decided that my family was “complete”. He was correct in my case. But how many families are even able to feel “complete” in an economy in which a dependable job and home ownership are out of reach for so many? The vasectomy, then, represents yet another slice of modern life in which our agency draws a blank.
Ah, that sort.
