My wife and I have two children, and we love them dearly, dearly, the sleep-stealing, bank-account-depleting little trolls. But some days—when the living room is knee-deep in toys, when my daughter has flushed an apple down the toilet and my son has stripped off his clothes and run into the yard—we halfjokingly say that we can't wait until they become teenagers and ignore us. We can handle the two of them, barely. But a third? Outnumbered, we would have to switch from man-on-man to zone defense, and I can't help but shudder when I imagine a red-faced baby wailing through the night, the bank statements withering further, the walls crayoned, and the laundry hampers reeking of spit-up and poo. An unexpected pregnancy, in other words, would be a nightmare.
That's what happened to our friends. They had an Oops. We all know an Oops. The husband rips through his condom or the wife forgets to take her pill.
Oops. The parents of the Oops always say it was meant to be. They say they can't imagine life without their dear third or fourth or (mercy!) fifth child. But they say these things years later, after the kids are grown, when the memory of sexless and sleepless nights, the financial and emotional panic, have long since faded. When our friends first broke the news about their accidental pregnancy, we told them, "Congratulations," but our smiles trembled at the edges. That same week my wife got on the phone and scheduled my vasectomy. We'd been discussing the idea for months, and I'd finally assented. Think of all the sex we would have! Wild sex! No pregnancy anxiety. No frantic rummaging through the bathroom cabinet for the last nerve-deadening condom. No doublechecking the expiration date stamped on the foil and struggling to unroll the rubber one way, then the other, hoping all the while that the mood won't pass. We'd be able to do it anytime, anywhere. I could step into the shower or push up against her in the produce section at Whole Foods, jog my eyebrows, and say, "You wanna?"
Now that I have a date with a surgeon, an appointment with a knife, shadows have begun to steal across my fantasies of rolling around in the organic lemongrass. I find myself thinking of Cocoa. Cocoa was my childhood dog, a standard poodle with floppy hair. He humped everything in sight—sofas, legs, our cat, Mr. Meow. My parents finally took him to the vet. He returned sad-eyed and tamed, with a scab between his legs that took a long time to heal. A vasectomy isn't a castration, I know. Still, I cannot help but feel that, on some level, I, too, am being disciplined. That I, too, am a bad, bad dog.
It was in a dog that Sir Astley Cooper—in his 1830 Observations on the Structure and Diseases of the Testis—discovered that after an artery and vein were tied, sexual activity no longer resulted in fertilization, though the testes continued to produce sperm. But it wasn't for another sixty years that the vasectomy became regularly prescribed for remedying an enlarged prostate or bladder stones or criminal behavior (a precursor to the eugenics movement during which hundreds of thousands were sterilized worldwide). And it wasn't until the 1970s, after negative ad campaigns about the pill and a feminist demand for greater male responsibility in family planning, that the vasectomy became a more widespread form of birth control.
Today in the United States, one in six men over the age of 35 have been cut. It is the responsible thing to do, the right thing to do. I know this. The prolonged use of birth control pills may increase a woman's risk of cancer. A hysterectomy, along with the standard risks of major surgery, has such long-term psychological and physical risks as depression, hormonal imbalance, sexual pain, osteoporosis, and heart disease. Tubal ligation in women also has a much higher rate of failure (one in every 200 cases as opposed to the vasectomy's one in 2,000). Contradictory as this may seem, by getting a vasectomy, I'm manning up. At least that's what I keep telling myself.
by Benjamin Percy, GQ | Read more:
Photo: Martin Kilmas
