Friday, November 21, is “World Vasectomy Day.” It is this November’s culmination of a variety of global celebrations of male sterilization. Each year, the first three weeks of November are set aside for that purpose, with activists in one country—this year, Argentina—acting as organizers.

The annual celebration of vasectomies is significant because it plays into a central tenet of modern “feminism”: male negligence of the fertility “problem,” thrusting the burden of “pregnancy avoidance” on women. It’s why feminist orthodoxy insists that women must always have access to abortion: without it, they claim, women cannot escape the consequences of fertility with the ease men traditionally have. 

Men who get themselves sterilized, therefore, demonstrate their “loving sensitivity” to women’s plight in the face of procreation by taking “responsibility” for it. In the post-Dobbs world, where abortion-on-demand through birth is no longer universally guaranteed in all 50 states, men having vasectomies get double feminist brownie points.

It is telling that the latest revision of the USCCB’s “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,” which added language against pharmaceutical and surgical interventions undertaken as “gender-affirming healthcare,” inserted the new provisions just before and flowing into preexisting text related to sterilization. In traditional Catholic moral theology, sterilization was treated under the rubric of “mutilation” because it required the actual damaging of healthy body parts in order to effect infertility. 

The mutilation involves snipping and sealing off the male’s two vas deferens to prevent delivery of semen from his testicles to his urethra for ejaculation. It treats fertility not as a dimension of the person but, at best, as a biological phenomenon that really does not matter. “Trans surgery” likewise treats the person’s fertility as an insignificant phenomenon to be sacrificed in the name of the “greater good” of “gender transition.” Psychological happiness justifies permanent damage to one’s genitalia—making one body system (the reproductive) inoperative, and another (the excretory) require rerouting to a new exit.  

Did you ever ask yourself why there’s no male “Pill,” i.e., pharmaceutical contraceptive? Men have traditionally impeded their fertility either by mutilation (vasectomy) or barrier methods (condoms). I remember reading an article somewhere this year about a researcher interested in developing a pharmaceutical contraceptive for men. One big problem is hormonal. Women’s fertility is cyclical, men’s is constant. So theoretical hormonal requirements to suppress male fertility pose more daunting requirements. 

But the author of the article asked a further, intriguing question: Would the average guy agree to take or have implanted long-term, extended-release chemicals? The suggested answer was no. Sterilization is “one-and-done,” as in a certain sense are condoms. Male chemical contraception would require making male fertility a more central focus for a man than it likely generally is.  

The disconnect of male sexuality’s nexus to fertility arguably begins with masturbation, a practice that negates both the procreative and unitive meanings of conjugal intercourse in favor of an exclusively pleasure-centric focus. That latter focus arguably persists subsequently in fornication as well as contracepted marital intercourse. Male chemical contraception would suddenly make a de facto non-issue—fertility—into a central issue for attention. It would also likely require long-term administration of hormones, with their unknown immediate psychological and long-term physiological consequences. Will the average man buy into that? 

Among women, a consciousness is developing about the deleterious mental, emotional, behavioral, and relational effects of long-term hormonal birth control, e.g. Sarah Hill’s This Is Your Brain on Birth Control. If women, by experience, are recognizing the negative consequences of artificial birth control that Pope Paul VI articulated almost 60 years ago in Humanae Vitae, do you think men will freely elect to go down that route, especially when it changes their usual non-focus on the subject and would involve ongoing “hassle”? Among women, a consciousness is developing about the deleterious mental, emotional, behavioral, and relational effects of long-term hormonal birth control.Tweet This

No, the truth is many men have come to terms with ignoring their fertility and its consequences while usually not doing anything about it. But the “solution” cannot be fertility’s destruction, either temporarily by still not extant “male contraceptives” or permanently by sterilization. Despite the relative ease of the “one-and-done” nature of male sterilization, I’d argue most men still viscerally feel a connection between their fertility and their personhood, expressed as their manhood (since all human personhood is sexed). At a gut level, before the modern propaganda of blessed barrenness gets in the way, most men likely feel sterilization as some kind of self-mutilation.

Male “responsibility,” therefore, is not—as World Vasectomy Day tries to suggest—self-mutilation but an awareness of the meaning and significance of male fertility in relation to persons: to one’s partner, to one’s potential child, to one’s self as potential father, to God from whom “all fatherhood in heaven and on earth derives its name” (Ephesians 3:15). Only when that happens will we escape the so-called contemporary “crisis of fatherhood” (or, rather, absent fatherhood) with all its attendant personal and social ills.  

The first-generation feminists—women like Mary Wollstonecraft—rejected female contraception because they insisted women’s “progress” would not come from degrading to general male indifference the gift of fertility. Elevated male appreciation of that gift, not snipped vasa deferentia, seems to be the way forward. But when did we last hear any of this discussed in church, much less elicit something extraordinary, like an episcopal “Special Message”?