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| Photo Credit: AP. |
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Denny Dalliance had long worried about what would happen if he fathered a child because his job as a truck driver keeps him away from home most of the week.
But after
the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, the 31-year-old
Independence, Missouri, man decided it was time to take action — and jumped at the
chance to sign up for a free vasectomy.
“These are
grim circumstances under which I made this decision,” he said as he drove a
load of cardboard boxes through Kansas this week.
The
vasectomy he is scheduled to get next month is part of an effort that involves
Planned Parenthood and a physician with a mobile vasectomy clinic. Sixty
vasectomies will be offered over three days in and outside Planned Parenthood
clinics in St. Louis, Springfield and Joplin to uninsured patients during the
first week of November amid what the clinics say is a surge in demand for the
procedure.
Dr. Esgar
Guarin then plans to take his mobile clinic — a vehicle decorated with large
images of sperm that his friends have jokingly dubbed the “Nutcracker” — on the
road the following week to offer 40 more free vasectomies in several towns
across Iowa.
Guarin also
plans to offer discounted vasectomies that month at his regular clinic in the
Des Moines area.
The efforts
are part of World Vasectomy Day, originally a single-day event that now
includes a year-round focus and a host of activities in November.
“It’s a very
particular moment in reproductive rights in the United States. And we need to
we need to talk about it,” he said, adding that vasectomies are performed far
less often than the tubal ligation method of female sterilization, even though
they are cheaper, have a shorter recovery time and require local, rather than
general, anesthesia.
Guarin, who
serves on the medical advisory board for the World Vasectomy Day, helped offer
vasectomies last year at the Planned Parenthood in St. Louis to raise awareness
about the procedure. The effort was so popular that the decision was made to
expand it to other cities even before the toppling of Roe sent demand soaring.
In July
alone, the Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri
performed 42 vasectomies, compared to 10 in the same month last year. Female
sterilizations rose to 18 that month from just three in July 2021.
The American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has been hearing similar reports
from around the country that more patients are seeking tubal ligations. It is
too early for any post-Roe national numbers on permanent sterilization, said
Laura Lindberg, a professor at Rutgers University’s School of Public Health in
New Jersey.
Planned
Parenthood, for instance, doesn’t have national sterilization numbers available
for this year yet. However, its national web page has seen a 53% increase in
vasectomy information searches over the last 100 days, a spokesperson said.
Data from
Google Trends shows that searches about vasectomies briefly spiked after the
leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs case but then reached their
highest level in the days after the court released its decision in late June.
Dr. Doug
Stein, a urological surgeon in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Florida, area, said
patient registrations for his practice tripled immediately after the Dobbs
decision, with many patients under the age of 30.
“I think
everybody is busier since the Dobbs decision,” said Stein, who co-founded World
Vasectomy Day.
Dr. Arnold
Bullock, a St. Louis urologist who does about 35 vasectomies a month said that
before the U.S. Supreme Court decision, patients waited about a month for the
procedure while the wait now is two to three months.
In Texas,
Dr. Koushik Shaw said his Austin Urology Institute saw a spike when Texas
enacted a strict abortion law last year and another, larger one after the U.S.
Supreme Court decision, so that it’s now doing 50% more procedures. He said
many are for men who don’t want children and saw access to abortion as another
option should birth control not work as planned.
“It really
pushed family planning to the forefront of people’s thoughts,” he said of the
loss of abortion access.
Lawmakers
are responding to the growing demand. A California law that will take effect in
2024 will make vasectomies cheaper by allowing patients with private insurance
plans to get the procedure at no additional cost other than what they pay for
their monthly premiums.
Dr. Margaret
Baum, the medical director of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and
Southwest Missouri, will be partnering with Guarin to provide the free
vasectomies. She has been having lots of conversations with patients about
permanent sterilization in recent months and said there is a sense of urgency.
“I think
people are afraid, No. 1, about abortion not being accessible, which is a very
real and legitimate fear and in the reality for a large part of folks in our country.
And then I think people are also really afraid that what else might be next,”
she said.
A vasectomy
involves cutting and sealing the tube that carries sperm, preventing it from
entering ejaculate fluid. Baum said she chats with patients to keep them calm,
sometimes turning on a playlist that includes “Great Balls of Fire” and “The
Nutcracker Suite.” Most patients are fully recovered in a couple of days.
Dalliance,
the truck driver, said he didn’t want to thrust the responsibility of birth
control on partners anymore, especially with abortions harder to get. His home
state of Missouri was among the first in the country with a trigger law in
effect to ban abortions at any point in pregnancy.
“I don’t
want to come off as though I’m like unhappy to be doing this, but this is a
situation where my hands kind of got forced with regards to the Roe v. Wade
decision,” he said.
“I feel like
that with the extreme cost involved with having a child in the United States, I
kind of got priced out,” he said. “And so this is me cashing out my chips as it
were. It’s the right ethical decision for me, but it’s not one that’s made
lightly.”
Associated
Press writer John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, and News Researcher Jennifer Farrar
in New York contributed to this report.