WHY MUST FAMILY PLANNING FALL ON WOMEN WHEN MEN CAN SIMPLY GET A VASECTOMY?

WHY DOES FAMILY PLANNING STILL FALL ON WOMEN

Why Is It Always Her?

Why is it that once two faithful couples says, “We’re done having children,” everybody suddenly turns to the woman? Why is it her body that must be altered, injected, cut, stitched or tied, all in the name of family planning? Why is family planning treated like a woman-only assignment? Why is it normal for a woman to carry pregnancy, go through labour, breastfeed and still be the one expected to permanently shut down reproduction? Why does nobody ever ask the man if he’s willing to take one for the team?

In many African homes, once the decision is made to stop having children, the next sentence is usually, “She should opt for permanent contraception (she should go and tie her womb), not, let’s talk about it together and not what’s the best option for us? It’s just her.

The Fear Nobody Wants to Admit

The part that honestly annoys me is the fact that men can actually do vasectomy. It’s a simple medical procedure, it’s safe, it doesn’t reduce sexual performance, your hormones are not affected, it doesn’t make a man less of a man, but once you mention it, some men start acting like you just suggested something extreme.

Suddenly, they’re worried about what could go wrong. Yet women are expected to take injections that affect their hormones, insert devices into their bodies or undergo surgeries that permanently change their bodies and nobody asks if she is scared.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that a lot of men avoid vasectomy not because it’s dangerous, but because of what it represents to them, to some, it feels like losing their power, to others, it feels like losing control, but somehow, permanently altering a woman’s body is seen as completely normal. To be honest, some men simply don’t prioritize family planning because they do not believe in it or consider the long-term implications of fathering children they cannot fully care for, after all, they won’t be the ones carrying a child in their belly for nine months.

What Family Planning Should Really Look Like

It takes two people to make a child, so it should take two people to prevent one too. Family planning should be a shared decision; it should be something couples talk about openly. It should involve compromise and understanding and shouldn’t be something that automatically lands on the woman’s shoulders.

If a man can enjoy the benefits of not having more children, then he should be willing to share the responsibility of making that decision permanent. It shouldn’t always be, she should go and do it, sometimes it should be, let me do this for us.

The Conversation We Need to Start Having

The truth is, we’ve become too comfortable with women suffering and too comfortable with men avoiding inconvenience. We’ve normalized women carrying the physical cost of reproduction while men carry the authority of decision-making and until we start having honest conversations about this, nothing will change.

If a man can make family decisions, then he can also walk into a hospital and make a sacrifice for his home, because family planning is not about locking wombs. It’s about responsibility and the responsibility should never belong to only one person.

From a medical perspective, men can safely undergo vasectomy, and women have their options too, each with different risks and effects on the body but one, lesser than the other. These are not just opinions; I confirmed the details with a medical personnel, so this isn’t based on assumptions.