Why I Got a Vasectomy at 28

Editor's Note: Ted Cox’s mom cried when she found out that he had a vasectomy at 28, but he has no regrets. His new column for the Good Men Project looks at the reasons more men are opting out of fatherhood.

The desire to remain child-free hit me suddenly sometime in college. Sort of like my addiction to Mountain Dew and Japanese game shows. The reasons are many:

First, as the oldest of my family’s seven kids, I’ve already changed way more than my fair share of diapers.

Second, instead of spending Saturday mornings watching Ted Jr. strike out at Little League games, I’d much rather watch those Japanese contestants humiliate themselves on TV.

I’m not alone. Surveys show that the number of so-called “childless-by-choice” Americans is on the rise.

And even those crazy people who do want kids are making fewer of them. Earlier this year, the National Center for Health Statistics revealed that the U.S. birth rate is the lowest it’s been in a century: a mere 13.5 bloody, oozing births for every 1,000 people. The tanking economy is one of the biggest reasons -- baby food is freaking expensive.

But last week, as I watched yet another poor sap on television slam chin-first into a padded wall, I wondered: why don’t other dudes want kids? Was it for financial reasons? A hatred of children? An aversion to touching poop?

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To get some answers, I contacted Laura S. Scott, a writer and producer who focuses on the child-free movement in North America. (Yes, there’s a whole movement.) Scott is the author of Two is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice. (Yes, there’s a guide.)

From 2004 to 2006, she surveyed 171 single, partnered, and married adults, asking them to rank 18 “frequently cited motivations for remaining childless.” The motivations were statements like, “I don’t think I would make a good parent” or “I don’t enjoy being around children.”

Scott says her survey group is one way her research differs from many earlier looks at the childless-by-choice crowd: the earlier studies usually ignored men.

“I did a bunch of research and realized there hadn’t been a lot of books written on this topic for a while,” Scott said in a phone interview. “And most that had been written were for and about women, I guess under the assumption that, you know, motherhood is instinctual and fatherhood is learned.”

So when Scott looked for respondents, she made sure she found some guys. Fifty men volunteered their answers; 121 women responded.

And as the survey progressed, she found that “Men really had a lot to say in the decision-making regarding remaining child-free.”

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Scott says men and women feel the stigma against childlessness differently.

“Women tend to face more stigma for their choice to remain childless,” said Scott. “And they tend to be more acutely identified with their childless status than do men.”

“Young men particularly don’t really face a lot of stigma for not having children yet. Perhaps as they grow older they may get questioned by their peers,” she said.

But, she said, the pressure for men to have children can be greater in conservative religious communities or particularly pro-natal cultures -- like Chinese or Indian cultures, for example -- where producing an heir carries a lot of weight.

But back to the survey. Respondents ranked how they they identified with each reason on a scale from 0 (the lowest) to 5 (the highest). Scott then ran the results through some fancy statistical analysis to identify what mattered most in a person’s decision to remain child-free.