Vasectomy - Ideological Issues

Ideological Issues

Egalitarian approaches seek to decrease levels of inequality in the "contraceptive burden" which exist between males and females, with implications for the topic of vasectomy. The emphasis on "shared responsibility" has been taken up in recent research and articles by Terry and Braun, who regard much of the earlier psychological research on vasectomy as seemingly negative, or 'suspicious' in tone,. In research based on 16 New Zealand men (chosen for their enthusiasm on the topic of vasectomy), researchers extracted primary themes from their interviews of "taking responsibility" and "vasectomy as an act of minor heroism’.

The need to "target men’s involvement in reproductive and contraceptive practices" was historically raised on a global scale at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, in relation to both population control and decreasing the levels of inequality in the ‘contraceptive burden’, which has traditionally placed responsibility for contraception unfairly upon women. Vigoya has referred to a global "cultura anticonceptiva femenina" - a female contraceptive culture, where, despite the possibility of men taking more responsibility for birth control, there is virtually nowhere in the world where true contraceptive equality exists.

Feminist researchers emphasize the positive identities that men can take up post-vasectomy, as a "man who takes on responsibility for the contraceptive task" and a man who is willing to "sacrifice" his fertility for his partner and family's sake. Often these sorts of accounts are constructed within the 'contraceptive economy' of a relationship, where women have maintained responsibility of the contraceptive task up until the point of the operation. Terry notes that a man undergoing a vasectomy may also mean he receives a high degree of gratitude and positive reinforcement for making the choice to be sterilised, perhaps more so than a woman who has been on the oral contraceptive or similar for years prior.

An alternative viewpoint of contextualizing vasectomy debate is the evolutionary "battle of the sexes" conflict of interest. From an evolutionary Darwinian standpoint, males may increase their genetic fitness by mating with multiple mates over the course of their lifetime (see Sexual Conflict). As a woman's reproductive capacity reduces significantly with age towards menopause, eventually ceasing while a male partner is still able to produce offspring (see Age and Female Fertility), she benefits in evolutionary terms from her partner undergoing vasectomy - eliminating or greatly restricting his ability to mate with other women in the future, thus helping to ensure or protect her partner's investment and resources for herself and any offspring. Vasectomy may in this way be advantageous to female reproductive strategy (after a threshold number of offspring are born), and detrimental to the male reproductive strategy, if viewed in generalized evolutionary fitness terms alone.

Men who undergo pre-emptive vasectomies (choosing to have a vasectomy in order to be childfree permanently through sterilisation) may be regarded as "sticking up their finger at evolution", and their decision may be furthermore viewed as a rejection of contemporary modes of involved fatherhood. The study suggested that men took a "positive spin" on their self-identification of themselves or their lifestyles as "selfish" and "unconventional", using discourses of choice and personal responsibility.