Letters to the Editor: A nation of vasectomized men — did you envision this, antiabortion zealots?

To the editor: If vasectomies are on the rise, then restrictive abortion laws clearly impact men as well as women.

There’s talk that limiting contraception is the next step after limiting or outlawing abortion. If women are required to travel to another state for abortions, birth control pills or other forms of contraception, will men also be required to travel to another state for vasectomies and condoms? Those are, after all, also methods of contraception.

If vasectomies and condoms remain legal in states where birth control pills are not, will birth control laws be considered gender-based and therefore discriminatory?

In addition, how many men will be willing at an early age to give up having biological children because they can’t count on abortion services if a woman’s contraception fails?

The law of unintended consequences can be brutal.

Maria Simpson, Los Angeles

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To the editor: Silver linings in the form of vasectomies temper the anger I feel over the Supreme Court’s Hobbs decision killing Roe vs. Wade. That vasectomies are on the rise is good news indeed. Fewer unwanted pregnancies will do more to prevent abortions than all the antiabortion zealots in the country.

After reading “The Limits to Growth” in 1972, I knew overpopulation was the root of most of the world’s ills. A few years later, at the age of 23, I got a vasectomy. I never regretted it.

Decades later, I endowed vasectomy funds through Planned Parenthood, and I donate to World Vasectomy Day every year. Using hundreds of doctors, they perform thousands of vasectomies in more than 30 countries on a single day in November. They do this every year so that men who want the procedure but cannot afford it can get the 15-minute operation for free.

Paul Scott, Santa Monica

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To the editor: Did the majority right-wing Supreme Court, which seems to harken to a time when women should be kept “barefoot and pregnant,” envision a nation of sterilized women and vasectomized men? Probably not.

But, the court’s decision earlier this year to overturn Roe vs. Wade and take away a woman’s right to choose may have created an awareness in men that birth control is not only the responsibility of women, but theirs too.

Donna Sloan, Los Angeles