Editor's Note, March 2025

I volunteer alongside over a dozen incredible people as a clinic escort at Planned Parenthood in Portland, Maine. About half are retired and remember the dark days before Roe. The other half, like me, are young enough to have taken the constitutional right to abortion for granted, until it was quashed nearly three years ago. Two-thirds are parents. A third are men.

One of those men (and parents) is my friend Sam. We’ve known each other since we were kids, and I’ve always found him to be an exceedingly positive and principled person. When he was 32, Sam was diagnosed with anaplastic astrocytoma — a rare, malignant, and ultimately terminal brain tumor. It has now been nine years since a craniotomy, a month of radiation, and 18 months of intermittent chemo bought him an unknown amount of time before another [likely more deadly] tumor develops.

He had just finished his MA in English, with plans to become a high school English teacher, when he received his diagnosis. Unable to pursue full-time work, he became a part-time director of Passport to Manhood, a Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Maine program to engage boys ages 8–14 in discussions and activities that reinforce character, leadership, and positive behavior. He helped these boys — many of them newly settled in Maine from fraught places such as Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia — learn what it means to be responsible, respectful, considerate men.

Sam and his wife knew they only wanted to have one child, for many reasons: “My cancer, our relatively low income, our tiny condo, and most of all, the vastly degrading environmental and political state of our overpopulated planet.” A few years after their daughter was born, Sam and his wife decided that he would pursue the “easiest, cheapest, and least painful way to solve this issue”: vasectomy. He was able to get a “free, fast, professional procedure” at the very clinic he defends from the sidewalk on a weekly basis.

The feature article in this issue, “Surge in Americans Getting Sterilizations Given States’ Abortion Laws,” recounts the experiences of men like Sam who wanted to take responsibility for family planning within their relationships, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The article reports on a new study which found that, as a group, young men ages 19–26 had 95% more vasectomies in August 2022 than in May 2022. Another study, whose results are depicted in the infographic on page 6, looked at patients of all ages and found that vasectomy services steadily increased from 146,796 in 2019 to 198,212 in 2022.

As long as unmet need for family planning and threats to existing access persist, we won’t stop fighting for universal affordable access to the full array of proven contraceptive methods — including vasectomy. And we’ll continue to cheer on the men of the world — men like Sam — who take measures to lift the burden of pregnancy prevention from their partners’ purview.

– Marian Starkey, marian@popconnect.org