They’re cutting to the chase.
Younger men in the Big Apple —- and across the country — are scrambling to book appointments to get vasectomies in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, urologists and prospective patients told The Post.
Dr. Alex Shteynshlyuger, director of urology at New York Urology Specialists in Midtown Manhattan, estimated that calls about vasectomy procedures to his office have soared by more than 500 percent this week, with many consultations booked for July and younger men jumping on the bandwagon.
“If they’re at a point where they don’t plan on having children and have been relying on other methods of contraception, that can certainly drive them toward vasectomy,” Shteynshlyuger said.
Even with New York officials pledging that abortion will still be legal in the Empire State, not everyone understands that, he said.
“To someone who might not understand the legal system at a deep level it sounds like the Supreme Court has banned abortion,” Shteynshlyuger said.
DJ Edgerton, 53, who is single and splits his time between Manhattan, Newport, RI, and Sarasota, Fla., isn’t convinced abortion rights are secure in New York and was among those prompted by the SCOTUS decision to call Shteynshlyuger’s office about getting snipped.
Edgerton, who founded a design technology firm, said his sisters and two daughters “have been busting my balls” during the last few years to get a vasectomy in order to avoid unwanted fatherhood.
“It’s a tragedy that this right has been taken away from women and I think the convenience of that as an option no longer being (there), especially that I live in Florida half the year, makes this a more potent solution,” Edgerton says.
In states that are now considering abortion bans or greater restrictions, the SCOTUS decision has prompted men who may have once considered the procedure to now go under the knife.
“The possibility that it could become banned here — I think that possibility for my partner and everything has been pushing me for it,” said CJ Hall, 28, an associate manager for a cell phone company in Lawrence, KS.
Hall said that he and his partner agreed they do not want to have children and last week’s court ruling ultimately prompted him to call a local hospital and schedule his operation.
He is slated to have the procedure in early August, the same month Kansas will vote on a state constitutional amendment which could revoke the right to an abortion, which Roe had guaranteed since 1973.
Staff at medical offices told The Post that they have been stunned by the number of childless, younger men asking about the procedure during which the tubes that carry sperm are cut or blocked. It’s usually considered permanent, but reversals are sometimes possible.
“This week, we have had a lot of people calling to try and get in for a vasectomy,” said Isis Thomas, a nurse and office manager at Mercy Hospital Oklahoma City. “We have had a lot of younger generations trying to get in and get that done for sure.”
She added that “we normally have in one day of people calling and trying to get in maybe five to six patients, but this past week, we’ve had 15, 16 people call in a day.”
Dr. Blake Johnson, a urologist at Summit Medical Center in Salt Lake City, UT said he started seeing an uptick in interest after a draft of the Supreme Court ruling leaked in May.
“Since the actual decision, we’re all of the sudden booked out until September,” Johnson said. “It’s way up.”
Megan Kavanaugh, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based pro-choice organization, said some people are seeking sterilization procedures in states where ability to get abortion seems secure because they no longer have faith that rights they’ve assumed as given will be around for much longer.
“I think that there’s a broader recognition that the way that people decide to plan their families, have children, not have children, wherever you live, that personal choice that people have thought was always available to them is now a little bit more at risk,” Kavanaugh said.
