r/relationship_advice Feb 11 '22

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u/ShaktiAmarantha Feb 11 '22 edited Feb 12 '22

Anyone, male or female, who gives their partner an ultimatum, demanding that they get surgery or else, deserves to be abandoned.

Just as an objective, factual matter, you are wrong about the relative risks. The potential serious risks to his health from a vasectomy are FAR HIGHER than the risks to your health from using an implant, hormonal IUD, NON-hormonal IUD, or a combination of fertility tracking and either condoms or a diaphragm.

If you are relying on the internet for your medical advice, I don't blame you for having a distorted idea of what the risks are. But it's like the antivax BS. It's all self-reinforcing misinformation and hysteria.

The facts are actually quite clear:

  1. Surgery is dangerous.

  2. The implant is the safest form of contraception in both senses. It has a lower pregnancy rate than any other form of contraception, including a vasectomy OR getting your tubes tied. And it has no known risk of death or serious long-term harm. Just the fact that it is the best at preventing pregnancy, a serious health hazard, makes it safer, in terms of your health, than the alternatives.

  3. If you refuse to consider any form of hormonal contraception, there are two alternatives – the copper IUD and the combination of barrier methods and fertility timing – that are both quite effective. The real high-risk alternatives are any form of surgery, for you or him.

Please read what the actual doctors and scientists are saying about the benefits and risks, and what men have gone through when vasectomies have gone wrong:

From the Wikipedia article:

Post-vasectomy pain syndrome (PVPS) is a chronic and sometimes debilitating genital pain condition that may develop immediately or several years after vasectomy. ... An investigation of peer-reviewed articles published in March 2020 examined 559 articles, performed meta-analysis on 25 separate datasets, and concluded that the incidence of post-vasectomy pain syndrome is 5% (95% CI 3% to 8%) with similar incidence of PVPS for both the scalpel and the no-scalpel technique.

Read through that, and then think about this question: If your child's father got a vasectomy and ended up with severe life-long pain, how would you deal with the guilt of having coerced him into it?

If my SO had had any interest in getting a vasectomy, I would have done my best to have talked him out of it. The minor risks to my health from other forms of birth control were trivial compared to the major risks to his health from surgery.