When economic times get tough, you make a lot of cuts – dinners out, movies, new clothes, anything and everything that isn’t strictly necessary.  Then there is “the cruelest cut of all”.  During the recession, a survey suggests, American men resorted to having vasectomies in greater numbers than before, with 150,000 to 180,000 “extra” procedures recorded each year between 2006 and 2010. Extra procedures are the vasectomies above the long-term average.  The survey results suggest these men didn’t take a sudden dislike to children. Rather, the economic climate left them feeling that it was a bad idea to leave even the slightest chance of raising a costly little bundle of joy to adulthood.  This snipping trend first began creeping its way into the public debate at the height of the recession, in 2009. At the time the reports were largely anecdotal, as men anticipating the loss of their health insurance along with their job rushed to urologists’ offices for the procedure while they could still get the $750 or cost covered.  At the same time Planned Parenthood clinics in some areas began reporting an uptick in abortions at about the same time.  A dramatic, permanent solution to a passing economic situation?  Well, yes, but we often don’t realize how much the economy and the financial world we live in shapes the course of our lives. For instance, we have children when we can afford them. Money plays an important role in decisions we consider emotional.  The fact remains that the cost of raising a child to adulthood might be enough to send even the most knife-wary father of two scurrying to his urologist as rapidly as possible. That’s even before you factor in the crippling cost of a college education.  As reported last summer, the cost of raising a single child born to an average middle-income family to the age of 18 now hovers around $245,000. Even a low-income family in rural America can expect to pay $145,500 over those 18 years on the road to adulthood.  It isn’t just the numbers that are unnerving, but the trend: the cost is rising. Expressed in today’s dollars, the costs for that average middle-income family in 1960 were only about $198,000. Meanwhile, once you throw college tuition into the mix, it becomes downright terrifying. College tuition alone is up 1,225% since early 1978, a period in which inflation has totaled only 279%. Inflation in tuition bills is double that in healthcare.  While the “snip survey” doesn’t extend into the recovery, other data does. By 2009, the pregnancy rate had fallen to 102.1 births per 1,000 women aged from 15 to 44, the lowest in 12 years. By 2012, the birth rate in the United States had plunged to a 25-year low and only began to pick up, for the first time since 2007, in 2013.  By the end of this week, we’ll have an idea of how many new jobs were created during October. Regardless of how rosy those figures turn out to be, it won’t alter the hard truth: the events of 2007-08 and the recession that followed altered more than the reproductive abilities of hundreds of thousands of American men. It took a toll on their psyches, and those of their partners.  Deciding to have a child is an act of optimism and confidence. Yes, there’s a biological imperative to reproduce – but anxiety has already been linked to natural infertility, making it possible that economic struggles might already dampen fertility. Why would it be surprising that Americans would respond to the crisis, the recession and the grueling “jobless” recovery in a more prolonged and conscious fashion, by making a deliberate decision to become a parent or to have additional children?  Unemployment is a tremendous source of stress. That’s true even of the risk of future unemployment, when those all around us are losing their jobs.  And one of the ugliest factors in this particular recession has been the brutal toll it has taken on the long-term unemployed. The long-term unemployment rate – defined as those out of work for more than half a year – may have fallen from its peak of 4.3% in 2010 to about 1.9% by the third quarter of 2014, but that’s still a full percentage point higher than the average between 2000 and 2007, the congressional budget office reported.  Even Janet Yellen, now head of the Federal Reserve, took note of this in a 2013 speech before she took over responsibility for US monetary policy. “The toll is simply terrible on the mental and physical health of workers, on their marriages, and on their children,” she said.  But here’s the big question: why is our national funk hitting even those who should be most optimistic: the younger Americans, those in their 20s, 30s and early 40s who are most likely to be having children?  Logic suggests that this group should be most optimistic. They have more of their lives still ahead of them in which to recover, emotionally and financially, from the wreckage of the last few years.  I recall graduating from college myself in 1983, toward the end of another recession, and seeing friends who had received their degrees two years earlier still struggling to find jobs. For the next few years, it still wasn’t a pretty picture, but by the late 1980s, we were all on our feet, more or less, as were those a decade or so older than we were, who had lost their jobs  Something really maybe different this time, however. Yes, every recession is brief – however prolonged it feels at the time. But this recovery hasn’t felt like much of a recovery to most of us, with only a modest rate of job creation and lackluster economic growth. And during this “recovery”, between 2010 and 2013, the median income of American families actually fell 5%, according to a report by the Federal Reserve.  Ask any volunteer on a suicide prevention hotline: when someone is in pain, it’s tough to get them to accept even the possibility that life will become better one day. And the longer that wait becomes, the more skeptical they are likely to be.  Sure, recessions don’t last long. But the scars they leave on lives do.  American men have endured the better part of a decade of stagnant wages, under-employment and uncertainty. They see the headlines about the soaring costs of raising a child. Why should this data even come as a surprise?  The only surprise for me would be if, in five years’ time, I see another study showing vasectomies in a sharp decline. It would mean something about our collective resilience.
The rise in the number of male vasectomies reflects the ways the economy can drastically change the course of our lives