Getting Sterilized to Own the Cons – The American Conservative

Vasectomy is unnatural. It estranges a man from himself. Its internal logic leads inexorably to abortion, population control, and eugenics.

How do you convince a man to get sterilized?

For Datta Pai, the answer was spectacle. Indias midcentury population boom inspired Pai and the rest of the nations public-health clerisy to launch a sterilization campaign. Pai, an abortionist in Bombay, deplored people pollution and advocated population control. He felt a mass-sterilization campaign would restrict Indias population growth, particularly among the nations fecund working class. Pai scoured the railway stations of Bombay and the Indian hinterlands, finding hordes of working men to cajole, convince, and sterilize.

While Bombayites were initially sold on the procedure by Pais impassioned advocacy, many men declined to attend their vasectomy appointments. Interviews with the absconders revealed what a 1974 report called emotional barriers to the procedure among the middle and lower class people whom [Pai] sought to reach.

To reassure would-be patients, Pai brought motivatorsmen who had been vasectomized and were from the same social class as Pais prospectsto the Bombay junction. He set up a surgery station in a railway car, where men gathered by the dozens to go under the knife. Within a matter of years, Pais streamlined operation propelled Bombays annual vasectomy rate from 360 procedures per year to nearly 280,000.

Pai learned his lesson from Bombay and brought his traveling circus to the Indian hinterlands. There, he set up vasectomy camps, which, according to the same report,

had a carnival-like atmosphere with movies, lotteries, and other activities meant to obscure the programs medical purpose. The majority of those undergoing vasectomy at such camps were poor, illiterate farmers.

If using carnival games to lure illiterate peasants into mutilating their reproductive organs seems immoral, Pai later admitted there could be a certain amount of misring out of enthusiasm.

The Washington Post seems to share that enthusiasm. On Sunday, the Post ran a piece profiling the men who have gotten sterilized, not for bread and circuses like 20th-century Indian bumpkins, but instead as act[s] of love.

The first man in the Posts profile recalled, with some satisfaction, the day of his vasectomy. After he heard local doctors were offering discounts on the procedure during World Vasectomy Day, the man immediately signed up to get snipped. His wife had experienced unpleasant side effects from contraceptives, he said, so he wanted to man up and get sterilized.

The procedure was a total relief, almost like the covid shotlike Im safe now, he told the Post.

It wasnt just a workaday flop-and-chop, of course: the man also went under the knife to support abortion rights.

Ive seen the miracle of life, he said. But Ive also seen kids who are born into poverty and misery and dont have a fair shot.

His implication is the same as Datta Pais: The underclass breeds too much. Its childrens lives are meaningless. The miracle of life is not to be found among the poor and miserable. Eight generations of trailer trash are enough.

The rest of thePost piece is agitprop for sterilizationvasectomies are said to promote family planning, to empower men to be responsible, to make a better man, each justification designed to normalize a bastard procedure whose administration was traditionally entrusted to veterinarians and war criminals.

Doctors who perform vasectomies say they wantmen to be open and comfortable talking about the procedure instead of recoiling in horror at the idea, a urologist named Doug Stein told the Post. He lamented that stigma still attached to a procedure that represents the ultimate way to be a good man.

The stigma remains because a vasectomy is unnatural. It estranges a man from himself. Its internal logic leads inexorably to abortion, population control, and eugenics. The Posts piece gestures at this, but will not say it explicitly.

At least Datta Pai had the courage of his convictions.

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Getting Sterilized to Own the Cons - The American Conservative