World Vasectomy Day and its Role in Raising Awareness

During the 1980s, I was on the Planned Parenthood, Mar Monte, Board of Directors. Through its 36 health centers and 11 community locations, Mar Monte provides medical services and education programs to 29 Central California and Northern Nevada counties. Mar Monte, like other Planned Parenthood branches, offers reproductive and general health services, including birth control, cancer screenings, prenatal care, pediatrics and primary health care.

My awareness of the importance of family planning, always an important subject to me, heightened when I began teaching English as a Second Language in California to Southeast Asian refugees. Most of the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees had large families with as many as eight children and struggled to provide for them. These large Southeast Asian families, headed by immigrants who had barely arrived in California, played a large part in the state’s population increase.

Not only did the parents have to assimilate to a new country with different customs and language, they had to somehow keep up financially. Although each newborn meant a larger monthly government assistance check, it wasn’t enough to offset the actual expense. Yet the refugees rarely practiced family planning. A 1988 study published in the Western Journal of Medicine found that 70 percent of all refugees “experienced barriers to services, including language, transportation and a lack of awareness.”

From my personal observations, I’ll add another barrier the study didn’t include. Some refugee mothers wanted to practice birth control, but their husbands refused to use condoms or to allow their wives to take the pill. Vasectomies, a procedure with which I was personally familiar, would have been out of the question.

As it happened, during the years that I taught ESL and worked on the Planned Parenthood board, I had a vasectomy. I was single with no plans to remarry. I had a teenage son and could not foresee circumstances under which I would be likely to want more children.

Vasectomy, a 15-minute, outpatient surgery, is one of the safest and best forms of contraception. The risks some researchers once associated with a vasectomy, mainly prostate cancer, have been discredited.

World Vasectomy Day is October 18. To promote what organizers call “the largest male-oriented family planning event ever,” 1,000 live, televised vasectomies will be performed.

Nearly one out of six American men age 35 and over, or 50 million men nationwide, has had a vasectomy. Most were married or cohabiting (about 91%), non-Hispanic white (about 87%) and educated beyond high school (about 81%).

More education about vasectomies, which WVD will provide, should help raise awareness in other demographic sectors.