I’m not certain that there has ever been a Supreme Court decision which has ever provoked the mass hysteria and insanity that has attended Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision which overturned Roe v Wade. We’ve seen all sorts of whacky comments that the decision means the end of the right to use contraception, marry someone of a different race, and same-sex ‘marriage.’
But this story, from the supposedly very serious Washington Post, pretty much takes the cake!
Men rush to get vasectomies after Roe ruling
By Meena Venkataramanan | June 29, 2022 | 3:12 PM EDT
Thomas Figueroa always knew he didn’t want children. Growing up in Central Florida, he remembers his classmates getting pregnant as early as middle school, and had considered getting a vasectomy for the past few years.
But after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, he rushed to schedule one. He registered Monday for a vasectomy with Doug Stein, a Florida urologist known as the “Vasectomy King” for his advocacy of the procedure.
“It is something I put on the back-burner of my mind until very recently, when the Supreme Court decision happened,” said Figueroa, 27, who lives in Tampa. “That was basically the triggering factor right there. It pushed my mind to say: ‘Okay, I really do not want children. I’m going to get this vasectomy now.’ ”
Figueroa is not alone. Urologists told The Washington Post that they have seen a spike in requests for the procedure in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
There’s more at the original, but it documents some pretty ridiculous thinking. If Mr Figueroa and others really, really, really don’t want children, why did it take overturning Roe v Wade to push them to have themselves gelded sterilized? Clearly, if a man doesn’t want to have children, but he is motivated to get a vasectomy only with the return of abortion laws to the state, that means he was counting on whatever women with whom he copulates to take care of contraception. Even if the man uses a condom himself, condoms do have a failure rate, which the Centers for Disease Control report to be 13%. The Guttmacher Institute defines contraceptive failure as:
the proportion of women who will become pregnant within the first 12 months after initiating method use. Typical-use failure rates express effectiveness among all women who use the method, including those who use it inconsistently and incorrectly.
The Guttmacher article refines the failure rates a bit: for condoms, the figure is 13% assuming that there will be some incorrect usage, but down to 2% if used properly, every single time.
Does Mr Figueroa use condoms, and is his usage always proper?
Well, who can know, but every form of contraception, including vasectomy, has a failure rate; for vasectomy, the failure rate is very small, 0.15%, but it is not zero.
What Mr Figueroa is saying, whether he realizes it or not, is that he has been depending on the women with whom he copulates to clean up his mess, and have an abortion, should contraception fail. But, even pre-Dobbs, there was always a chance that a woman he impregnated would choose not to kill her unborn child. If Mr Figueroa did knock up a woman, the decision as to whether he would have a child was entirely up to her, not him. And if such a woman chose against abortion, not only would he have a child, whether he chose to or not, but he’d be on the hook for 18 years of child support!
Too bad, so sad, must suck to be him!
I’m guessing that Mr Figueroa never realized just what an immature little boy he comes off as being. While I don’t know him at all, I have this big mental picture of him begging, pleading, crying, cajoling, whatevering the woman he impregnated to get an abortion. It might not be that way at all, but that’s certainly the image this story has put in my mind.