I had a vasectomy after Lily was born. She is our second. I love them dearly, like an all-encompassing shift in my life-force “love them dearly,” but after Lily, I had a vasectomy.
My parents grew up in families of nine children and seven children. Holy moly. Perhaps it was because farm labor was at a premium, each member of the family known by their ability to dig for weeds. How could my grandparents have possibly managed that, on subsistence farms, no less? I’m such a wimp.
Anyway, I cut out, after two. It’s an easy fix. The only thing that I can remember bothering me about the whole thing was when the doctor, in a pre-flight meeting, said, and I know I quote this word for effing word, “You know it’s going to look like a hand grenade went off down there.”
That’s right behind, “It’s our flag, too,” in Sid’s annal of lifetime significant quotations.
“You know it’s going to look like a hand grenade went off down there,” the doctor said to me from behind a wooden desk that was too big for the room and too big for the doctor.
Judy told me as I was writing this that, “On only one side did it look like a hand grenade went off down there.” Yeeks. You know, in that nicest-person-ever-on-the-Simpsons voice she has.
I wouldn’t know. Black. Blue, Left, Right. Doctor didn’t say I had to look.
That was it, without the help of anyone screaming “baby killer” at me when I got out of the car that day, a decision that Judy and I made together about our future and the health and welfare of our family and our money situation, the most private of stuff, privately in consultation with my physician, our choice.
Pre-flight. Big desk. Doctor. Hand grenade. “This is what’s going to happen.”
What could I say? Right decision. Now and then.
There was no going back. No Kennedy brood playing touch football over on the island near the viaduct for me. Snip. Snip. We’ve precisely, one boy and one girl, supplanted ourselves on the planet. Two kids is plenty. And by “is” I mean, as in number agreement with the understood “Having,” Having two kids, “Having” being singular. Having “is” not Having “are.”
I am the grammar police. I even know it’s not grammar, it’s usage. Because some of this stuff I have to explain. Some I only hope that you get. The “cut out” bit. You got that right?
Did I digress? Again. Funny how the oddest things connect.
After the Supreme Court decisions (nine people twice, that’s 18 decisions) that made it okay to outlaw abortion, I thought as I often do about the way language is used in law, policy and politics and I wondered if in the language of those decisions there is language that could be used exactly to rationalize the outlawing of a vasectomy. I don’t know why I just thought about it.
You know what a vasectomy is, a mostly irreversible surgical procedure as a means of sterilization. Of males. Men. First performed on a dog in 1823.
“Bad dog.”
At the end of the 19th century it had become a method of forced sterilization like the kind in which Indiana became a leader, in an effort, Wikipedia’s carefully documented account says, “to both reduce criminal behavior … and prevent the birth of future criminals.” The vasectomy began to be regarded as a method of consensual birth control during the Second World War. By the 1980s, this is I talking, don’t blame Wikipedia, American radio announcers followed up weddings in shopping malls with live on-air vasectomies. Progress.
Speaking of progress, here’s what a man who also likes words, Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito, said in his abortion decision: “The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion”
Oh-oh. Vasectomy isn’t in the Constitution. I don’t have to look, again. Could vasectomy be outlawed by the state of Indiana? Think about those adorable little spermy guys swimming around, ooncing their way up to the front of the line.
Legal abortion lacks “deep roots” in American history, Alito says. Does an 1823 dog count?
Some people say the language of logic in the Alito decision could be used to outlaw other modern rights, such as same-sex marriage, access to contraception or interracial marriage.
Not to worry. Abortion is different, Alito says, “unique” because it deals with “potential life.” Not like, say, carbon emissions or assault weapons. Those are about what comes after potential life. Life. Protecting the born. There’s nothing unique about a melting glacier or a shot up Fourth of July parade, or classroom full of kids, or supermarket, or nightclub, or concert. Happens all the time. That’s the price we pay for freedom. Some freedom. Not all freedom.
