The Current - More young men are getting vasectomies. Why?

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Ian Clements got himself an unusual 30th birthday present: a vasectomy. He’s among a growing number of young men going under the knife because they don’t want kids, pointing to reasons including the economy or the threat of climate change.

Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson and I do the show Frontburner. It's a daily news program, five days a week, a deep look at one story you actually want to know more about. One of the coolest parts of this job is when people show me how often one of our episodes comes up in their group chats. It's a real range of topics too. Rent gouging, Trump and Elon Musk, the Middle East, even culture stuff that has real consequences,

like Diddy, for example. So if you are one of those people sharing our stuff in your group chat, I just want to say thank you. And if you aren't yet, please find and follow Frontburner wherever you get your podcasts and please get it in the chat. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. I think a lot of people are surprised, like, oh wow, you got a vasectomy? Big people do that when you don't have kids?

Which is why I waited until I was 30. It's like, okay, well, I've thought about this enough. Let's just get it done. Get it done. That's Ian Clements from Winnipeg. He's part of what some doctors say is an emerging trend. Men under the age of 35 who don't have children, don't want children, and are opting for surgery to keep it that way.

CBC Manitoba producer Cory Funk joins us from Winnipeg with this story. Cory, good morning. Good morning, Matt. How did you come across this trend? Well, actually, full disclosure, I recently actually went and got a vasectomy myself. Is that something that you thought

that you would ever say on national radio? Well, I had to because I stumbled across the story, so now it's just how it is when you're a producer to me myself. Is that something that you thought that you would ever say on national radio? Well, I had to because I stumbled across a story. So now it's just how it is when you're a producer. So since you have said that, I'm gonna ask you some personal questions if you don't mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. How old are you?

I'm 34. Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I kind of fit that same sort of demographic as Ian's in because I do have two kids and they're great but but my wife and I have both decided to is as many as we want to have. Yeah so was so and while I was at the clinic I did meet a doctor who as it turns out is actually kind of a big deal on Winnipeg's vasectomy scene. Hi I'm Dr. Errol Billencoff. I've been in practice since 1989 and since then I've done around 30,000 vasectomies.

And while he was actually doing my procedure, we got to chatting. As you do when you are undergoing a medical procedure. Got to pass the time somehow, right? Yes. So Dr. Billinkoff, he told me that, he's actually seen an age shift in men who want a vasectomy, and these men, unlike me, don't have kids.

I've definitely noticed a huge change recently. It used to be very unusual 30 years ago for somebody who didn't have kids to come in and want a vasectomy. I would say it was kind of a COVID thing, that probably since the beginning of the pandemic, I started to notice this. And now it's become so common that probably a day doesn't go by that I don't see somebody

who doesn't have kids and wants a vasectomy. A day doesn't go by when he doesn't see this. So is this something that he is aware of just in his clinic or is your sense that other doctors are seeing this as well? Yeah, well, so from my research, it's not just at this one clinic. It appears to be a Manitoba thing for sure. So Dr. Premal Patel, he's the director of urologic research

and an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba. He's also the co-founder of the Men's Health Clinic. That's one of the biggest providers of vasectomies in the province. And he says this is also a trend he's seeing and one he actually plans to study. I also actually reached out to individual physicians in other parts of Canada, Dr. Pierre Boucher.

He performs thousands of vasectomies a year in Montreal. And here's what he had to say. Well, basically, you know, like that's very true that we see more and more younger men without kids. They don't want kids. They've been sure of that for many years and many cases. You know, I see those young men anywhere in between one and five a week. you know, that's a lot.

I also spoke with a doctor in Vancouver, Dr. Neil Pollock. He's been practicing 25 years and has also done tens of thousands of these procedures. And he told me he's been seeing a similar uptick too. So there, Matt, are some anecdotal examples from around the country. Beyond anecdotes, do we know whether there's data that gives us a better picture as to what's going on here? I reached out to Stats Canada, the Canadian Urological Association, the Canadian Institute for Health Information,

Manitoba Health, just to name a few, and they were able to provide some information about vasectomy rates in Canada, but the breakdown was not specific enough to know about childless men. So actually no definitive Canadian numbers out there. But Dr. Billinkoff has heard from enough doctors to believe it is a growing trend beyond just his own kind of anecdotal experience. He told me about an online chat group of physicians from around the world who perform vasectomies

and he said that this is something many of them have noticed as well, this increase in the number of young childless men asking for the procedure. So what's going on here? What do we know about why more men without kids are opting for a vasectomy? Yeah, well, so there are some recurring themes. The doctors I spoke with pointed to the economy, anxiety over climate change, and even a growing world population.

But I wanted to hear from some of those men myself. So I managed to find a couple of guys who were willing to chat. Daniel Kinley, he's 34, so same age as me. He got his vasectomy more than a year ago, and he's engaged and works full-time at a building supply store. And I asked him why he decided to not have any kids. The economics of it are bad,

and even now, I'm more stable in my life, but sometimes it feels like, you know, you're slipping. We had a repair on our house and that that drained us and it was a repair on something that needed to be done and if we had kids we wouldn't have been able to do it but for me personally that's just seeing the world there's so much selfishness and greed that everybody seems like they're for themselves and I wouldn't want to bring somebody in there when it's kids require a community to grow and

it doesn't feel like there is a community. That's a pretty bleak view. I mean, it's also, as he said, an issue of an economic crisis. People feel this across the country that it's expensive. Children are expensive. Life is is expensive and this could just be another thing that perhaps you are struggling to pay for. Who else did you talk to? So I also spoke with Ian Clements, who we heard from just at the beginning of this story. He actually got a vasectomy as a 30th birthday gift to himself. That's unusual.

Right? And I went to his place and he was wearing this this t-shirt that a friend made to commemorate the occasion. So picture this, Matt. It had two oranges on it and it said, all juice, no seed. There's merchandise for those who undergo this procedure early on. Hey, maybe a little side hustle, not a bad idea. Anyway, so here's why Ian said he doesn't want kids and got a vasectomy to seal the deal. I've kind of always thought about getting a vasectomy. Like even when I was a teenager, the thought of having kids was like just terrifying for me.

And it wasn't really something I thought I wanted to do. And then later in life, after going through like multiple relationships and like being engaged and buying houses and all these things, that kind of came up later on too where I was like maybe I should I should do this. Like it makes sense for my lifestyle and for what I want with my life. When I was 30 I was with a partner who was having some issues with birth control. And obviously condoms aren't the save all thing for males to use. So she had brought up, would you ever think about getting a vasectomy?

And I was like, oh, absolutely. I've actually thought about this before. And if this is gonna help you figure out your issues, I would love to do this. I mean, people's decision to have a child, that's a very personal decision. And they will make it based on any number of things. It's interesting to hear those two guys talk about why they were not interested in having children and why they took the step to prevent

that from happening. What about doctors? I mean, you came onto the story in part because you were there in the doctor's office. What are doctors saying to you about how they're dealing with these requests from young, childless men, as we say, who want vasectomies? Yeah, it's really interesting, Matt. So actually, up until I did this story, I kind of just assumed that if you're a guy and you want a vasectomy, you just go in

and you get it, no questions asked. But Dr. Billinkoff, he actually says, still to this day, it's not uncommon for physicians to refuse to perform vasectomies on men under 30, especially men without kids. Oh really? Yeah. And the conventional medical wisdom has been that the younger a patient is, the more likely they are to change their mind about wanting kids down the road. And doctors saw themselves

as protecting patients from that future regret. But now Dr. Billinkoff told me that physicians are starting to think differently about that approach, including himself. I used to pretty much refuse it in cases where I didn't think it was appropriate. But through conversations with the other doctors as part of this international chat group, that exact topic did come up and there was quite a range of attitudes about it from the extreme ends. On one end you've got people saying, no, there's no way you should do a vasectomy on a 23-year-old with no kids.

And then others are saying, well, they got the right to have it if they want it. Who are we to interfere with that decision. And so I think more and more we're realizing that it's really not our choice, but it's really their choice. So I do still try and discourage it. I often suggest that they get a referral from their family doctor who knows them better than I do. So if they feel that it's in this person's best interest, then I support that, but there's definitely been less resistance to doing them in younger people.

So it's really interesting, this shifting attitude may also be partially responsible for this uptick in childless men getting vasectomy simply because more doctors are actually willing to perform the procedure on them. I mean, the other element of this is that the procedure is not exclusively one way, right? Vesectories can be reversed. And so you wonder how much that contributes to it. That men might think, you know, I made this decision, but maybe down the line I could change my mind and go back. Yeah, that might be part of it.

Overall, the number of men who change their minds varies actually from about two to 6%. And they generally have to pay for the reversal out of pocket. So that very well could be thousands of dollars. But also there are no guarantees about fertility after reversal. The success rate according to the doctors I spoke with

is between 60 and 90%. So for example, right on Dr. Neil Pollock's website in Vancouver, there's a message for younger men. It says that a vasectomy should be considered as creating permanent sterility and non-reversible. And that younger men, especially those in their 20s with fewer than two children, are most likely to seek reversal in the future, but can be disappointed when the procedure is unsuccessful. So they encourage young men who get a vasectomy to consider freezing sperm

actually as an insurance policy for the future. So he has some strong cautions there about what to expect from reversals. But for both Ian and Daniel who we heard from earlier there, they told me that they have no regrets and have no plans to change their minds. What else did you learn about why men are doing this? Why young men in particular are making the choice to go childless? You've hinted at a couple of things. Yeah, I think it's actually kind of a simple answer.

I think it may just come down to the fact that more people are just talking about it publicly. So, I mean, for example, with the internet now, there's this whole Reddit thread dedicated to people who do not plan to have children. And it's got, get this, Matt, 1.5 million members. Zachary Neal, I spoke with him, he's a professor of psychology at Michigan State University, and he studies people who choose to go child free.

Our data and lots of other data suggest that the number of people who say they don't want children is increasing. We do know that men are very slightly more likely to say that they don't want children than women. But what we don't know is if this is a true increase in the number of people who don't want children, or if people are more comfortable saying that they don't want children, that this has become a more socially acceptable choice to voice. And so it's probably a combination that there have always been a number of people who didn't want children, but they were reluctant to say so, combined with a true increase in the number of people who don't want children. So we think it's, we certainly think that as people see

more child-free individuals expressing this choice, they realize that it's an acceptable life course to choose. And that may partly explain the increase in numbers we're seeing. I mean, it's interesting here, men often don't talk about matters of health. We clam up, we tend to clam up when it comes to speaking about these things. And yet you got Daniel and Ian speaking about this. How open are they and other folks that you have encountered in this story to talk to people publicly

about their decision. Yeah, so Ian actually joked that you could be sending a certain kind of message if you put that info on your dating profile, though he is obviously very open about it. But this decision still came actually as a bit of a shock, you know, for his family, for his dad and his mom. Like I knew she's always wanted me to have kids and she was the one who always like pushed

like, oh, maybe you should think about having kids and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, I don't know. So when I told her, this is like years after I've already told her like, I'm not. So I thought she was like gonna be happy that I did this, especially to help out my female partner at the time. But then I remember like telling her on the phone and like immediately I could hear her just like, like breathing really deep and like, oh, she's mad. But then now I've learned that my dad was actually

more upset than my mother was. And I didn't even know that end up until a couple of weeks ago. I think it's that thing with that generation that's like the key to happiness is by having a wholesome family. You know, having your kids you take care of and working a job to feed them and all this kind of stuff.

And I think they're just so used to that lifestyle that the way I'm living currently, they just don't, they understand it now, but it's just, it's still hard for them to fully grasp why I wouldn't want to have a family the way they did. And it's not even like, I don't want to do this because I grew up with a terrible family. My parents are awesome.

Like my best friends, they raised me good. I'm so thankful for them, but I just don't want to live the way they did. It's such an interesting snapshot of how people are living right now and how they're explaining the way that they're making those decisions. Corey, thank you very much for this. Thank you, Matt.

Corey Funk is a producer with CBC Manitoba. He was in our Winnipeg studio. Thoughts on this? You are welcome to get in touch. You can email us, thecurrent at cbc.ca.