March 2025
In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022, permanent sterilization consultations and procedures — especially for vasectomy — have increased to the point where patient waiting lists at urology clinics are often months long. A new study found that, as a group, young men ages 19–26 had 95% more vasectomies in August 2022 than in May 2022. Another study looked at patients of all ages and found that vasectomy services steadily increased from 146,796 in 2019 to 198,212 in 2022. This issue explores the stories of the real people behind these statistics.
Cover image: A mobile vasectomy clinic operated by Dr. Esgar Guarín was in West Burlington, Iowa, on November 18, 2022, in celebration of World Vasectomy Day, which falls on the third Friday of November each year. Dr. Guarín uses a no-scalpel technique, making tiny incisions under a local anesthetic. The procedure takes about 15 minutes to perform. Stricter abortion laws in many states have caused public interest in vasectomies to increase. (Photo by Keith Turrill / Alamy Stock Photo)
"In 43 years of doing this, I’ve seen maybe three or four couples who never had children or men who never had children. … But now we’re seeing a huge increase in the number of couples who think the world is too awful a place to bring children into.” –Marc Goldstein, board-certified urologic surgeon specializing in male infertility at New York’s Weill Cornell Medicine
Custom cartoon by Joel Pett in response to Donald Trump reimposing the Global Gag Rule, which bars international organizations receiving US family planning assistance from providing abortion services, referring patients to other providers for abortion services, counseling patients on abortion, or advocating for more liberal abortion laws in their own country, even if they do these activities with their own, non-US funding.
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