While women continue to toil with the coil, fewer men are prepared to get snipped. The answer why may lie in the rumours and fear that spread online
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here I was, lying on the operating table in just my socks and a Steely Dan T-shirt. I had taken the train back to my seaside home town in Essex to have a vasectomy after being on the NHS waiting list for almost two years, since our third child, Sylvia, was born. Three was our magic number. Any more and the car would become a wagon and dinner would turn into feeding time. And now, finally, the contraceptive burden would fall on me. After Hayley’s years of toil with a coil, and the pain of childbirth, I was due a little discomfort.
A vasectomy, as the pre-op letter explained, “is designed to make you sterile”. (You’d hope so.) It would involve “removing a segment of a tube called the vas deferens from each side so that sperm cannot pass through”. There would be an “injection of local anaesthetic to the skin of the scrotum” before “a tiny incision through the painless area of the scrotum, first on one side and then the other”.
As if coming full circle, I had lost my virginity on the same street as the surgery I was booked into. That night 25 years ago – to the inexplicable backdrop of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action-horror film End of Days on DVD – was actually far more uncomfortable than the procedure was. Aside from the initial “sharp scratch” of the local anaesthetic and the weirdness of making small talk with the surgeon and the nurse while the former operated on my scrotum, it was unnervingly simple and pain-free. It made my previous worries, prompted by things I had read online, feel a bit hysterical.
