When Lloyd Williamson lay on his back in a physician’s clinic in November last year, it was for the surgical culmination of years of soul searching. Williamson, who is 30 and from Essex north of London, remembers wanting a family as a child, but something changed in his early 20s.
“I thought: You know what? I don’t want to bring a life into this world, because it’s pretty shitty as it is and it’s only going to get worse,” he said two weeks after his vasectomy.
Williamson was largely motivated to sterilize himself by the climate crisis. Given the link between fossil-fueled economic growth and population growth, he believes that having fewer children is one thing individuals can do to help.
Illustration: Mountain People
“We can’t offset our carbon problem on to the next generation, because it’s not fair on them,” he said.
Williamson, who works as a data support officer for Essex County Council (he ran unsuccessfully to be a Green Party councilor in 2019), said he knows of other young, childless men who are thinking of doing the same. While reliable information on vasectomy numbers and motivations is scant, there is growing evidence to suggest that, all over the world, men without children are taking direct action.
Nick Demediuk, an Australian physician and one of the world’s most prolific vasectomy clinicians, said that most of his patients are fathers over the age of 35. However, having completed more than 40,000 procedures since 1981, he estimates that about 200 of the 4,000 patients that visit his clinic each year are younger men without kids. About 130 of them said they are doing it for the planet.
“In the old days, it was purely lifestyle,” Demediuk said of his younger, childless patients. “They wanted to travel the world, work hard and not be stuck with a kid, and that has shifted, probably over the past three or four years, to where the environment is the dominant reason.”
It should not be surprising that a generation with increased awareness of the climate emergency is asking big questions about traditional family structures. In 2019, at 29 years of age, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held back tears as she gave a speech about the climate emergency.
“I speak to you as a human being, a woman whose dreams of motherhood now taste bittersweet because of what I know about our children’s future,” she told a summit of mayors in Copenhagen. “Our actions are responsible for bringing their most dire possibilities into focus.”
A study in 2017 said that the single most effective action an individual could take in terms of helping the planet was having one fewer child; this would save more than 25 times the emissions of the next biggest undertakings (living without a car and avoiding long-haul flights).
Prince Harry cited the climate when he revealed in a 2019 interview that he would not be having more than two children.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, an associate professor of environmental studies at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, is the author of a forthcoming book about “eco-reproductive” choice. Last year, he carried out a detailed survey of 600 people aged 27 to 45 who were worried about the climate crisis. Of these, 96 percent worried that their children would struggle to thrive in or even survive the worst-case climate scenarios, while 60 percent were concerned about the carbon footprint of their potential offspring.
Schneider-Mayerson has not explored the rise of the climate vasectomy. It might still be a niche choice, often informed by other factors, including a broader ambivalence about raising children.
However, it raises ethical and political questions, including about controversial “overpopulation” ideologies, as well as the practical consequences of generationally imbalanced societies.
Apart from anything, Schneider-Mayerson said, “it’s sad that people are being forced to factor climate change into this decision.”
CHANGING MOTIVES
For Nate Miller (not his real name), a 36-year-old from Colorado, the 2016 election of climate-science denier Donald Trump to the US presidency was the clincher.
“I made an appointment to get a vasectomy later that week,” he said.
Like Williamson, Miller, who works for an environmental charity, had grown up balancing an assumption that he would have kids with a deepening environmental conscience.
“We’re driving ecosystems out of balance and causing mass extinction of countless species,” he said. “I think more people is the very last thing this planet needs.”
Other forms of contraception had worked for Miller and his long-term partner, but getting a vasectomy felt like a definitive act. They found a urologist who booked Miller after verifying that he was certain of his decision. Miller also wanted to be reassured, given the widely held view that the procedure is bloody, painful and somehow emasculating.
This perception is outdated, Demediuk said. The operation, which used to be more invasive and was carried out under general anesthetic, is typically bloodless; there is no scalpel involved. Instead, the scrotum is punctured under local anesthetic with a tiny pair of forceps, creating a hole just big enough for the vasa deferentia — the two sperm-carrying tubes — to be drawn into the open air. The tubes are cut, sealed and popped back in.
Demediuk said that the hole rarely requires a dressing, much less a stitch. The process takes 15 minutes and is more than 99 percent effective. Miller and Williamson said they were back to normal in days.
Vasectomies address the gender imbalance that still accompanies the choice and practice of birth control. They come with less risk than more invasive and less reliable methods of female contraception, including sterilization and the coil, yet they can be hard to come by, especially for younger, childless men.
Williamson had thought about getting a vasectomy in his early 20s, but was put off by grisly stories he heard from older men who had had the procedure years ago. Williamson waited in vain for the still-elusive “male pill” until, at 25, he learned about advances in the vasectomy. He asked his doctor if he could have one and was rebuffed.
While there are no laws on the age at which men in the UK can get a vasectomy, the National Health Service (NHS) advises that those asking for one might be more likely to be accepted if they are older than 30 and have children.
“Your GP can refuse to carry out the procedure … if they don’t believe it’s in your best interests,” the NHS guidance says, which also warns that reversals are unreliable, with a success rate of 55 percent within 10 years and only 25 percent thereafter.
Williamson accepts that minds and circumstances can change, but he viewed the guidance as paternalistic. When he turned 30, he tried again. This time, his doctor agreed, but said he would have to pay; the Mid Essex clinical commissioning group (CCG) — the physician-led body responsible for buying healthcare services in his area — withdrew funding for vasectomies in 2016 to save money.
In an e-mail, it said that demand was low, and that vasectomies “can be accessed relatively easily without too much financial burden and there are freely available contraceptive methods for women.”
Mid Essex was one of nine CCGs that cut or considered cutting funding about the same time, drawing heavy criticism from family-planning charities. When I contacted NHS England to establish how widely the procedure has been withdrawn, it said I would need to speak separately to all of England’s 106 CCGs. Access and waiting lists also vary in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Reversals are rarely covered by the NHS and are costly.
Williamson’s GP referred him to David Acorn, a physician in Essex who runs a private vasectomy clinic, one of dozens across the UK. Acorn, who charges ￡360 (US$495) for the procedure, said that Williamson was the first patient he saw who explicitly cited the climate as a reason.
However, he said he is getting more inquiries from younger, childless men.
“I’m particularly keen to make sure they fully understand the potential permanence of what they’re asking for,” he said.
Funding cuts could be part of the reason for an apparent decline in vasectomy numbers, but the privatization of the procedure makes demand hard to track. NHS figures show that there were nearly 20,000 operations in 2010 and 2011, and fewer than 4,500 in 2020 and 2021. Whatever the true figure, family-planning groups are trying to rebrand “the snip” to tempt more men to share the burden of contraception.
TACKLING STIGMA
There is hope that the climate crisis might burnish the vasectomy’s progressive image. In 2012, Jonathan Stack, a 64-year-old American filmmaker, cofounded World Vasectomy Day, a campaign dedicated to tackling the stigma and myths surrounding the modern vasectomy. Stack had one himself after having three children.
“It’s about gender equity, family planning and more responsible masculinity,” he said.
World Vasectomy Day is an annual event and year-round program that has worked with family-planning groups and public health bodies around the world. Clinicians, who are offered training in the latest no-scalpel technique, have performed almost 100,000 vasectomies as part of the campaign.
Four or five years ago, Stack began to notice growing demand among younger, childless men.
“A lot of it has to do with a feeling of economic instability and a general sense of uncertainty in life,” he said.
Nonetheless, he was surprised by an unpublished campaign report he received from a project in Bolivia run jointly by World Vasectomy Day, Marie Stopes Bolivia and Laval University in Canada.
In November, four Bolivian physicians received training, part of which involved performing 127 supervised vasectomies. The average age of the patients was 31, and 25 percent did not have children. When all the men were asked why they were getting a vasectomy, 48 percent said they did not want more kids. What stood out for Stack was that 28 percent of the men said they were motivated by climate concerns.
“Seeing this growing trend of people who don’t have enough faith in the future to believe having a child is a good decision is a little disturbing,” he said.
However, “what do we read in the news that would make us think this is a great time for kids?” he added.
Stack is not alone in having a sense of unease about the push to curb procreation. Demographers have predicted that the global population is to enter a sustained decline by the end of this century, easing demand for resources, but fueling far-reaching shifts in society. A care crisis among older people is already playing out in many parts of the world. In May, China said that it is allowing couples to have three children, after the shift of its notorious one-child policy to two children in 2016 failed to increase the plummeting birthrate.
Stack is anxious to distance his campaign from theories of “overpopulation” and their longstanding overlaps with anti-immigration and often racist ideologies such as eugenics and eco-fascism. Paul Ehrlich’s landmark 1968 book, The Population Bomb, is credited with amplifying the environmental movement, but “populationism” has also been widely blamed for emboldening right-wing population-control and immigration policies.
In 2018, the British songwriter and activist Blythe Pepino co-founded the BirthStrike movement for people who had decided to forgo children in response to the coming “climate breakdown and civilization collapse.”
The well-meaning group made a splash, but shut its Web site in 2020 because the name BirthStrike “did no end of harm in allowing us to be aligned with the ‘overpopulation’ topic.”
Another controversial moral philosophy, antinatalism, calls for the extinction of the human race by ending procreation.
“I think there would be some concern if the climate movement becomes closely attached to antinatalism or an ethic that calculates the value of human life and carbon emissions,” Schneider-Mayerson said.
PARENTING VIABLE
Vasectomies do not necessarily preclude parenting. Rodney Pohl, 26, an IT technician, is planning to foster or adopt with his wife, Carrie, who watched Pohl’s vasectomy at the SimpleVas clinic near their home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in June last year. The couple were motivated partly by what weather extremes foretold. A polar vortex had taken out the power on their street for 10 days.
“We had neighbors breastfeeding small infants and we were sharing generators to try to keep their fridge going, to not waste [expressed] milk,” Pohl said.
In Essex, Williamson, who is not in a long-term relationship, said he might also adopt one day.
“There are more than enough children and young adults already out there who could have a loving home and family — it doesn’t have to be your own blood,” he said.
Neither he nor Miller expect to regret their vasectomies. Pohl said he very occasionally feels pangs of broodiness, but “I quickly move on.”
Williamson said he cried after his procedure, but with relief.
“It was such a weight off my mind after having all that uncertainty about bringing someone into this world,” he said.
He said he wishes that governments were doing more to legislate for the climate crisis, before sharing his thoughts about what is known as “bystander apathy.”
“A lot of people are happy to point and say: ‘That’s wrong,’ or film it on their phone,” he said. “I look at the world and say: ‘That’s not right; I’m going to try to do something about it.’”
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
RSS