More Single Men Are Getting Vasectomies. That’s Hot.

There are a few sentences that will have a Dallas girl drooling over a man:

“I am related to the Crow family, and they’ve put me in the will,” is one of them. 

“Nine mimosas are perfectly acceptable at Sunday brunch,” is another. 

And a third (and easily the best): “I had a vasectomy.” 

Swoon. 

It wasn’t always this way. As Texas women have had to face fewer options in birth control and bodily autonomy over the last few years, a vasectomy has become a larger green flag. And there’s a growing number of young single men with vasectomies in Texas and across the nation, who are, for lack of a better word, swimming around the dating pool. 

The change can be traced back to June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court reversed the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, returning abortion to a state’s right issue, says Dr. Esgar Guarin. The general practitioner has exclusively performed vasectomies for the last six years, ballparking 8,000 in his medical career, and around 80 each month. 

Following the court’s decision, Guarin says his clinic experienced a 100% increase in bookings. For months, he was performing double the number of vasectomies — the volume of procedures has still not fallen to pre-Dobbs numbers. 

“I thought it was going to just be reactive because that’s what happens,” Guarin tells us. “Before the Dobbs decision, the percentage of patients who would get a vasectomy without children was about 10-11%. Currently, my percentage is about 16-17%.” 

Guarin says that the change in demand came from men in their mid-30s who had already decided they did not want children, but had been depending on their partner’s access to birth control and abortions, just in case. So, before you buy a man a dozen roses with a “get well soon” card post-op, keep in mind that this was always an option. 

“It is awfully unfair if you think about that,” Guarin says. “You’ve had that at your disposal all this time. You have decided not to have any more children. Now that you feel that you cannot rely on something that you don’t have to go through, that’s when you make the decision. It was a little bit of a bittersweet situation for those of us who are promoting the participation of many [types of] contraceptives.”

Guarin says there are certainly younger men who come in requesting the procedure, too, which requires a bit longer conversation, but Guarin says that performing a vasectomy on a young and childless man is simple medical equity. 

“A responsibility we have is to respect [patients’] decisions because there is nothing as personal as the ability to reproduce,” he says. “The same way no one should be telling a female individual what to do with her body, no one should be telling a male individual what to do with his body in terms of his ability to reproduce.”

You might wonder what would inspire a man to want to get up close and personal with the male genitalia all day, every day, scalpel in hand. For Guarin, the answer is simple. 

“It seems that when we talk about abortion, we tend to forget the fact that women don’t get pregnant spontaneously,” he says. “They get pregnant because there’s somebody else putting the sperm in there. What are we doing about that? How do we bring the other party to the conversation? A vasectomy is a good way to do it when you’re ready to be done with your fertility. That’s why I do it.”

Texas Men Have More Reason To Step Up

Jake, a 35-year-old Dallas teacher who would not like his personal medical and reproductive information Google-able, was once married. At one point, the two were trying to have kids. Now single, he chose to undergo a vasectomy. The procedure was straightforward and took just 30 minutes. He isn’t against having children, but he’s certainly against having children right now, and he figures he might as well meet women halfway. 

“I figured that since I don’t currently want children, I don’t want any accidental children,” he tells us. “The risks are just too big for me. When thinking about the side effects of the alternatives, like hormonal birth control, or painful IUDs, the logistics of one are so much less complicated than that of the other.” 

Jake, a lifelong Texan, isn’t banking on reproductive rights in the state to improve anytime soon, and if legislative sessions of yore are any indication, he’s probably right.

“A lot of my decision is in Texas, how difficult it is, and how much more difficult it’s probably going to become,” he says. “There is all sorts of talk about continuing to reverse all other forms of contraceptives. There are rollbacks in terms of rights for women. It feels like the responsible thing to do when I don’t want kids right now and have this much control over what I do.”

Dr. Guarin does not draw parallels between birth control and a vasectomy, as he equates women getting their tubes tied to a more even comparison. However, tubal ligation rates are performed at a much higher frequency in the United States, and the procedure is much more complex, requiring anesthesia. There are also currently no FDA-approved birth controls for men, leaving vasectomies as their only pregnancy preventive measure aside from abstinence. 

Jake feels good about his choice. If fatherhood calls to him, he’s got lots of options, and reversals are possible, though Guarin also does not recommend approaching a vasectomy as a non-permanent procedure. All in all, both men wonder why more men aren’t getting vasectomies. It’s an easy procedure, it’s highly effective and it’s a good option for people who know they don’t want children. 

“There’s some element of masculinity that people attribute to it that I think is also misplaced,” Jake says. “Because at the end of the day, it’s just a careful choice. People make more careful choices about what they’re going to eat than whether, how and when they will reproduce.”