#595: The Question of Vasectomies

Evangelicals confront the body, an ongoing series.

TLDR: Why vasectomies are still problematic.

Now that Planned Parenthood has brought the vasectomy bus to the Democratic National Convention, online evangelicals have suddenly discovered that they are opposed to them. As I have said before, I would wager that 30-40% of middle-aged evangelical men whose families are “complete” have already had a vasectomy or are seriously contemplating having one. And there is almost no stigma around them. The fertility industry has gone to considerable lengths to normalize vasectomies, even at points advertising “brosectomies”—that is, operations where friends can get ‘snipped’ at the same time. There is something undeniably weird and deeply politicized about getting the operation done at a political convention—but the evangelical Twitterati’s performative outrage is only the latest instance of the culture wars allowing it to scapegoat others whilst ignoring the same pathologies at work within our own communities. 

It is both a point of pride and a scandal (to me) that Mere Orthodoxy has published one of the only substantive discussions of ‘permanent contraception,’ which includes both tubal ligations and vasectomies. Zach Hollifield essay is both thorough and well-reasoned: it offers the kind of substantive moral reflection that Mere Orthodoxy uniquely provides in the Christian intellectual ecosystem. 

It is also deeply wrong, and wrong in ways that lend legitimacy to the kinds of intellectual and spiritual currents that I vociferously opposed when I was writing at Mere-O. Those efforts culminated in a long and justly forgotten evangelical theological ethics of embodied life. That book made no effort at being comprehensive: I deliberately left both race and contraception to the side, on grounds that the questions both involved seemed to exceed my understanding and abilities. In retrospect, my decision to bracket those questions likely slanted my sociological depiction of how evangelicals relate to the body. I still have little patience for hasty dismissals that evangelicals are ‘gnostics’ because they speak about heaven or think communion is only (though never merely) a symbol. But the uncritical accommodation of a superficially innocuous practice like vasectomies comes from somewhere, and until evangelicals face up to our deep entanglement in the spirit of the age our witness to the truth will remain impotent. 

Over the past 90 years, these accommodations have made their way into Protestant moral theology by way of the logic of ‘exceptions.’ Whether it is contraception, vasectomies, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, or even abortions, evangelicals need “grave and serious reasons” to move forward, to only employ these means with “prayerful discernment.” As one moral theologian once quipped about this approach to abortion, the net effect among the mainline churches has been abortion on demand with tears. In evangelical contexts, IVF and surrogacy are positively celebrated while no one cares about vasectomies and contraception. (A friend recently sent me images from an evangelical megachurch who cheered an associate pastor for using a surrogate to have a child—where the surrogate was the wife of a former pastor.) 

This history makes me not-very-sympathetic to the efforts to defend permanent contraception like Hollifield’s. There is almost a pathological intellectual heroism at work in the mentality that we can affirm ‘exceptional’ practices without allowing them to become pervasive in our communities. That might happen in a society where the spiritual, economic, and intellectual currents were naturally directing people toward the good of their bodily lives. In a world as pervasively anti-natural as our own, though, there are few if any bulwarks against exceptions being quickly mainstreamed. Which is why the only way forward for evangelicals, really, is to get beneath and behind the quotidian forms of life we have taken for granted and cultivate new ways of being bodily creatures in realms far removed from the controversial questions of sex and gender. Quit Netflix, kids, is the joke—but there is a serious line here about how evangelicals need to contemplate why we are incapable of gathering without being sufficiently caffeinated. 

Still, arguments like Hollifield need to be answered, not dismissed on the basis of a reactionary posture toward the world—satisfying and accurate as it otherwise might be.