Recently I've been seeing a lot of stuff talking about vasectomies, wondering why more men don't get them, talking about how great they are, encouraging other people to get them. I understand that women's bodily autonomy is at risk in America, but I don't think this is a reason to chuck men's bodily autonomy out the window and essentially suggest they should "take the bullet" for women by undergoing (what should be thought of as) a permanent procedure versus mostly non-permanent procedures for women that are available. Were reversible, safe, widely-available birth control available to men, I wouldn't really care about people encouraging its use (even if they were to say that men should take the responsibility for contraception), but this isn't the case.

To give an example, just now (what prompted me to make this post), I saw a post about someone's 21 year old boyfriend getting a vasectomy. In the comments, various people were portraying vasectomy reversal as "essentially guaranteed", and were leveraging this supposed fact to argue that men shouldn't worry about getting them. Sure, 75% in the first few years (NHS number) isn't a low number, but it isn't so high as to make a reversal completely trivial. If I cut off your leg with an 80% chance I could reattach it, I doubt this would be described as a guarantee. These posts had thousands of likes and the corrections barely scraped into the double digits and were met with a lot of uhming and ahhing about whether women's birth control is safer than a vasectomy. I would be deeply concerned if someone was pressured by their partner to have a vasectomy and had the likelihood of reversal misrepresented to them and subsequently regretted the decision. A post linked on stupidpol bemoaned the fact that a medical professional had questioned them rigorously about whether a vasectomy was right for them rather than giving them one out of hand, and this was particularly jarring for me.

To clarify, I have no problem with young adults making decisions about their bodies, I am deeply concerned about the rhetoric surrounding vasectomies and the flippancy with which reversal seems to be treated. Do tell me if I'm being unfair or am misinformed at any point here.