You want the ‘snip’, Jamie? Leave it in your wife’s hands...
WARNING: graphic content alert. Jamie Oliver revealed last week that he changed his mind about of having a vasectomy, and cited three reasons. One was a friend who – after the happy news broke about Jamie’s wife Jools being preggers with child number five – sent the chef a pic showing the state of his ‘old chap’ after he’d had the snip. ‘My mate had it done and it went wrong. He cried for three weeks – it went all black,’ Jamie told chat-show host Alan Carr.
Two, when at the doctors to learn about the procedure, he panicked when told the 15-minute op involved needles.
Three – and most important – his wife put her foot down. ‘Jools is like, “No,”’ Jamie revealed, ‘and I can’t even talk about it, I’m so nervous. No more.’
I can think of more reasons for men bottling this one. Jab, snip, ouch, bag of frozen peas on the affected area for a couple of days – and that’s it as far as having kids for ever. Plus, it must be emasculating in some way, which is why men don’t talk about it or put it on their Tinder profiles: it’s a bit like hanging a sign around your neck saying ‘shooting blanks’. A man choosing a vasectomy is not so much a turkey voting for Christmas, it’s like electing to be a capon instead.
It’s basic, it’s primitive, but why would a man – fertile for far too long in my view – decide to end his reproductive potential before time?
So I can see why Jamie hesitated, as my own father did when I was two. It was 1968 and he was in India, which was engaged in a massive effort to bring the birth rate down. He visited a vasectomy camp, was handed a form that stated ‘I desire to get myself sterilised’, thought it was a good idea, and only bolted when he was next in line for the chop.
A worker tried to persuade him to go through with it but when she failed, she handed him a document anyway saying he’d been vasectomised and directed him to a counter where he could pick up his thank-you from the state.
He thought it would be funny to post the official form to my mother. Later he was in New Delhi in a hotel and my mother was on the telephone in tears. He tried to assure her it was a prank. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she sobbed. ‘It says here you acknowledge receiving 18 rupees and a transistor radio!’
Now, Jools and my mother didn’t want their husbands to have the snip, and got their way, even though men can have vasectomies without their partners’ consent, just as women in this country can have abortions.
There’s an important difference between a vasectomy and a termination, though (you can still have a baby after an abortion) so it’s a very big step for a bloke to take – in fact such a big step that it’s probably best that he has the woman on board.
I would have been beyond angry if my husband had gone ahead and had the snip without my permission. I think this is because it takes two to tango, but as things stand, women still have to gestate and push the babies out, not to mention feed and care for them for the thick end of two decades.
FOR our pains, like it or not, females want the bigger say as to whether or not we get pregnant in the first place, and some control over whether our males can assist in that endeavour or not. Indeed, women want so much to be in charge of their biological destinies that this means denying men the right to determine their own procreational futures, too, as Jools did with Jamie.
If anyone’s going to make unilateral as opposed to joint decisions when it comes to family planning, women want it to be them.
But still, life doesn’t always work out like that. Stuff happens. As for Jamie Oliver, he says ‘no more’ after number five, even though he remains fully loaded.
Good luck with that, Jamie!