Vasectomy ‘unacceptable’

A CALL from the Pacific International Hospital obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Mathias Sapuri in The National last Thursday encouraging men to have vasectomies rather than women having tubal ligation is unacceptable.
One may not know the meaning of vasectomy and tubal ligation.
Vasectomy entailed a cutting and tying a man’s vas deferens (the tube that carries sperm to semen).
Whereas, tubal ligation is a procedure to cut or clip a woman’s fallopian tubes.
There are reasons why I condemn Dr Sapuri’s call.
Firstly, in the normal family order, man is always the head of the family. That means he takes lead in any decision between the children and his wife.
He has all rights to encourage his wife to get the tubal ligation.
Even if it’s a longer process, there’s nothing wrong with that.
It is the responsibility of a gynecologist to make sure the tubal ligation procedure is carried out carefully with no harm to mothers.
It’s unjust to put blame on men whenever tubal ligation operations go unsuccessful.
The health officers (gynaecologists) are to be blamed for that.
Secondly, vasectomies are made to be permanent so they usually cannot be reversed.
You should only get a vasectomy if you are really sure you don’t want to be able to get someone pregnant for the rest of your life.
Experts suggest that man’s age doesn’t have a significant effect on his fertility because there’s only about 1-2 per cent decrease motility/morphology per year unlike women where menopause starts when a female reaches the age of 40 to 50.
So imagine if a man at his 30s being vasectomised and had all or most his children unexpectedly die on an accident or disaster. How can that man reproduce? It will be regrettable.
If he has not be vasectomised, he is most likely to reproduce and make a family again.
Due to the advancement in technology and increase in number of doctors and scientists, we may come up with ideas to reverse the vasectomy procedures on men, but I believe Papua New Guinea doctors don’t practice this reversal process on vasectomy too often and may result in high possible risks and dangers.
It is the women who get pregnant and not men.
Thus, it is advisable to only apply tubal ligation on women and to do away with vasectomy on men.

Misack Ruri