Tying the Tubes

For a month we have been hearing about the moral unnaturalness—-the incomprehensibility and perversity—-of the traditional Christian opposition to birth control. But occasionally someone forgets about the party line and admits, sotto voce, that there is something to the traditional Christian position. Take a recent article in GQ where a man balks at undergoing a vasectomy:

In the weeks before the operation, whenever I brought up any of my fears with my wife, she gave me a withering look and said, “You’ve got nothing to complain about,” and threw out some grotesque analogy (usually involving a watermelon) to capture what it felt like giving birth. I got the same from her friends. “Try sleeping with some alien creature shifting inside you,” they said, “its weight on your bladder, its foot digging into your cervix.” Smiling, a touch vindictively, they’d make their fingers into scissors and go  snip snip .

I get it—but still. They endured pain to bring life into the world. I’ll be suffering to prevent life. It’s a kind of death, a vasectomy, and not only for my swimmers. I have a buddy whose father—a surgeon—gave himself a vasectomy. Yanked down his pants, tied himself off with surgical hose, arranged a mirror, applied local anesthetic, and got to work. When I asked him about it later, he said he didn’t trust anybody else with his soul. I know what he meant.

Life. Death. The author goes on to get his vasectomy, but the defense he mounts of his choice elsewhere in the piece is too weak to really meet the worries he voices here. He’s realized that these aren’t just issues of personal freedom, of men’s or women’s health. Ultimately, they are about whether we are willing to open ourselves to life or settle for a culture of diminishment and, as he puts it, “a kind of death.”