It's not easy to make the decision to have both spermiducts (or vas deferens), the channels that allow sperm to exit the testicles, ligated.
Vasectomy remains rare but it is becoming less rare among French men.
This contraceptive measure is quite radical, and more or less amounts to being sterilized.
Because even if the operation is potentially reversible (in half of the cases within 10 years), it is impossible to know in advance.
Although the operation has been gaining ground in France for several years, it has not yet become a common practice like in other countries.
Why get ligated?
Ronan Lerigoleur, a college professor who chose a vasectomy in 2020, told AFP:
“I was 39, I said to myself: ''I had two kids, did I'm making another one?'' I knew I wouldn't want it anymore."
Male methods of contraception are not very diversified.
In reality, vasectomy and condom use are the only two contraceptive choices a man has.
Publicized for several years, alternative methods such as contraceptive rings have not been scientifically proven.
In certain countries, particularly Anglo-Saxon ones, vasectomies are common, even if they tend to lose popularity.
This is the case in the United States, Australia and South Korea, where more than one in ten women rely on their partner's vasectomy to avoid having children.
In France, the situation is very different.
Authorized only since 2001, vasectomies have, for years, been carried out in tiny numbers.
Certainly, the situation seems to be starting to change.
According to a study, published Monday by Health Insurance and the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM), more and more French men are choosing this option.
“The number of vasectomies has increased each year since 2010, going from 1940 vasectomies in 2010 to 30,288 in 2022, an increase by fifteen,”
summarize the authors of the study, supervised by epidemiologist Mahmoud Zureik.
A simplified surgical procedure
Now, there are even more men than women choosing a form of sterilization.
The authors of the study see this in part as a consequence of the affair of Essure implants, commonly used as a method of female sterilization before being withdrawn from the market at the end of the 2010s due to adverse effects.
This crossing of curves is also linked to the progression of vasectomies.
This is difficult to explain, the authors recognizing that
“sociological studies”
would be necessary.
“The reduction in the burden of the practice may have led men to resort more to vasectomy
,” says demographer Mireille Le Guen, a specialist in contraception issues, to AFP.
Most vasectomies are now carried out during the day at the hospital, whereas a significant number of patients still had to spend the night there a few years ago, often under general anesthesia.
But Ms. Le Guen remains cautious about reading an embryonic trend.
If vasectomies are on the rise, they are starting from so low that their frequency remains low: only 0.15% of men under 70 have made this choice in 2022.
“There is a possibility that we will end up "a marginal practice, but let's keep in mind that it still concerns very few men"
, notes the demographer, who nevertheless notes a
"diversification of profiles"
towards slightly more privileged environments than before.
It is therefore too early to judge whether vasectomy is less scary.
A four-month reflection period remains imposed on French people tempted by this operation, the potentially irreversible nature of which should not be taken lightly.
It is also difficult to conclude that there is an effect of increasingly visible feminist discourse in favor of better sharing of the
“mental burden”
of contraception, the responsibility for which most often falls on women, particularly through the pill.
This is, in any case, one of the considerations that motivated Ronan Lerigoleur.
“My wife didn’t always tolerate the pill well
,” he explains.
“There is no photo: I had an operation and it was fixed.
Otherwise, it was for life.”