‘More people is the last thing this planet needs’: the men getting vasectomies to save the world
With the climate crisis becoming ever more urgent, a growing number of young, childless men are taking the drastic decision of being sterilised for environmental reasons 
Simon Usborne, Wed 12 Jan 2022 06.00 GMT 
When Lloyd Williamson lay on his back in a GP’s clinic late last November, it was for the surgical culmination of years of soul searching. Williamson, who is 30 and from Essex, remembers wanting a family as a child, but something changed in his early 20s. “I thought: you know what? I don’t want to bring a life into this world, because it’s pretty shitty as it is and it’s only going to get worse,” he says, two weeks after his vasectomy.
Williamson was largely motivated to sterilise himself by the climate crisis. Given the link between fossil-fuelled economic growth and population growth, he believes that having fewer children is one thing individuals can do to help. “We can’t offset our carbon problem on to the next generation, because it’s not fair on them,” he says.
Williamson, who works as a data support officer for Essex county council (he stood unsuccessfully as a Green party councillor in Chelmsford in 2019), says he knows of other young, childless men who are thinking of doing the same thing. While reliable data on vasectomy numbers and motivations is scant, there is growing evidence to suggest that, all over the world, men without children are taking direct action.
Nick Demediuk, an Australian GP and one of the world’s most prolific vasectomy clinicians, says most of his patients are fathers over the age of 35. But the doctor, who has completed more than 40,000 procedures since 1981, now estimates that about 200 of the 4,000 patients his clinic sees each year are younger men without kids. About 130 of them say they are doing it for the planet.
“In the old days, it was purely lifestyle,” Demediuk says of his younger, childless patients. “They wanted to travel the world, work hard and not be stuck with a kid. And that has shifted, probably over the past three or four years, to where the environment is the dominant reason.”
It should not be surprising that a generation with increased awareness of the climate emergency is asking big questions about traditional family structures. In 2019, the then 29-year-old US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held back tears as she gave a speech about the climate emergency. “I speak to you as a human being, a woman whose dreams of motherhood now taste bittersweet because of what I know about our children’s future,” she told a summit of mayors in Copenhagen. “Our actions are responsible for bringing their most dire possibilities into focus.”
A study in 2017 said the single most effective action an individual could take in terms of helping the planet was having one fewer child; this would save more than 25 times the emissions of the next biggest undertakings (living without a car and avoiding long-haul flights). Prince Harry cited the climate when he revealed in a 2019 interview with Vogue that he would not be having more than two children.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, an associate professor of environmental studies at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, is the author of a forthcoming book about “eco-reproductive” choice. Last year, he carried out a detailed survey of 600 people aged 27 to 45 who were worried about the climate crisis. Of these, 96% worried that their children would struggle to thrive in or even survive the worst-case climate scenarios, while 60% were concerned about the carbon footprint of their potential offspring.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/12/more-people-is-the-last-thing-this-planet-needs-the-men-getting-vasectomies-to-save-the-world