Anyone in Central and Western Massachusetts who wants a vasectomy has a new option: Planned Parenthood.
The Worcester location will start offering vasectomies on Saturday, Feb. 14. For the Massachusetts provider network, it’s an expansion into a new form of family planning in response to much higher demand from their patients, along with limited options in the western parts of the commonwealth.
“The requests have gone through the roof, particularly in the last couple of years — since Trump’s been office and the number of restrictions around family planning services, contraception abortion has increased,” Dr. Luu Ireland, chief medical officer for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, told GBH News in an interview.
Ireland says that in the central and western parts of the state, there aren’t enough vasectomy providers to meet demand in a timely way. Planned Parenthoods in Massachusetts do not offer tubal ligations, a form of permanent sterilization procedures for women.
A 2018 study put the number of vasectomies every years at around half a million. However, studies show they spiked in popularity right after the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which created a patchwork of abortion access across the United States.
Jake Morgan, an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, found a dramatic increase in the number of permanent sterilization procedures — vasectomies for men and tubal ligations for women.
“Right after [the] Dobbs decision, we saw that among men — young men between 18 and 30 — [there was] an immediate sort of jump in vasectomy procedures,” Morgan said.
For couples, vasectomies are one more option on a long list of birth control and family planning.
“We have pills, we have rings, patches, we have IUDs — but at the end of the day, women or pregnancy-capable people still bear the burden of pregnancy prevention,” Ireland said. “Vasectomy gives couples an option to share the responsibility of creating the kind of family that works for them.”
Increases were especially prevalent among unmarried men ages 18-30, Morgan’s research found, although the increase in vasectomies was far smaller than the increase in tubal ligations.
“It was definitely clear that both men and women were sort of reflecting on what they wanted to do on their preferences and sort of when they wanted to engage in these sort of conversations about fertility,” Morgan said. “What big changes in policy do is [they change] people’s risk-reward calculation.”
While some doctors perform vasectomy reversals, they are not covered by insurance. Ireland says she would never recommend a vasectomy to anyone who thinks they “may want to achieve a pregnancy in the future.”
“Are there surgeons out there who offer vasectomy reversals? Absolutely. Are they guaranteed to work? Absolutely not,” Ireland said. “Vasectomy reversals are iffy at best, and they’re often expensive.”
Vasectomies are covered by MassHealth and some — but not all — private insurance providers. For those who don’t have insurance coverage, it costs $700 out of pocket, though the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts’ spokesperson Caroline Kimball-Katz says there are payment options to help with affordability.
To start, all four Planned Parenthood locations in Massachusetts will be offering vasectomy consultations, but the procedure will only take place in Worcester.
Depending on the level of interest from patients, Ireland says they could start offering vasectomies more frequently and at their Springfield and Boston locations.
