Women who lie about taking their birth control, please meet the man who got a vasectomy and didn't tell his wife.
A woman writing in to an advice column on Slate says she and her husband, "Harry," struggled for two years with infertility. She blamed herself. She thought maybe it was that STD she got when she was a teenager. Her husband told her his sperm count was just fine. She suffered in silence until one fateful afternoon when she confided in her mother-in-law. That was when she found out Harry had gotten a vasectomy years ago and had never told her about it.
Not cool, Harry. NOT COOL. But there's more. Are you ready for his weaselly response when she confronted him?
Harry says he got that vasectomy years ago because he thought he'd never want children. And he was kinda, you know, passively hoping that his wife would just eventually drop it. "Oh well, no baby for us. Chinese for dinner tonight?" Shrug.
When has that EVER happened. That is not what baby-hungry women do.
Supposedly he's sorry and had NO IDEA that she was blaming herself. Right. And he's willing to reverse the vasectomy even though he doesn't really want a baby. So is this all just a terrible misunderstanding or is he a total sociopath whose seed should most definitely not get passed on to the next generation?
I guess you could make the case that maybe they don't communicate well with each other. But nope, I'm going with option B: He's a douche bag. Getting a secret vasectomy and not telling your wife is just plain unethical. This is just as bad as wives lying about taking their birth control pills. Maybe even worse.
Which do you think is worse, lying about taking your birth control or lying about your vasectomy?
Image via Bethd821/Flickr
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Comments 54
maybe it depends when he had the vasectomy. if he had it before they met he's not as big of an asshole as if he had it after they got married, knowing how badly she wanted children. but i do hope she's prepared to be a single mom, because men rarely change their minds about not wanting kids. she should have know he didn't want kids before she married him though. there is a HUGE difference between not wanting kids right now and not wanting kids EVER. so i think they're both dumb.
Uh-uh, Guest, apples and oranges: the "deceipt" shoe on the other foot, the woman is not looking at 18 years of financial burden, but the closing of a reproductive window that she will never get back, and a lifetime of emotional baggage of guilt and an empty promise for a family — a prime purpose and goal of most marriages. If, by your example, the man really didn't want children, then why didn't he get snipped and wear the warning label in the first place?
All matters of reproduction should require full disclosure before marriage, and committed relationships, for that matter.
In addition, he compounded the lie with more deceipt, year after year. This was not a "slip." I agree with the Emily's/Slate's advice to run, not walk, to a divorce attorney. He's only offering a reversal to regroup before the inevitable divorce anyway.
Personally, I found the adjoining article about the taboo of adoptive/bio siblings marrying, and the one about the husband that wants his own father the ObGyn to take his pregnant wife as a patient, more interesting! : /
Ugh. As someone that is struggling with infertility I cannot IMAGINE how stupid she must feel, taking test after test, confiding in and crying to her husband....what a piece of work that "man" is.
I have to ask the question that a few people have asked before me: didn't they talk about this before they married? According to the attached column, he got the vasectomy before they married. When you're dating a guy, when you're engaged, naturally, the conversation about kids comes up. Should we have them? When? How many should we have? At no point during their dating years did this conversation happen? Did HE never say, "I don't ever want kids"? Or did he say it and she just figured, "Oh, he says that now, but with ME, he'll change!!"
I suspect there's more going on here than we're given to believe. It's wrong that he let her go thru fertility stuff for so long, but equally wrong, if he has NEVER wanted kids, for her to think that it was all going to change if she got pregnant.
I also have to add... it says in the attached that "Harry said his sperm count was fine". I have never been through any kind of fertility issues, so I truly don't know this. Isn't doing a Sperm Count Test on the father a routine part of Fertility Testing/Treatment? And aren't the results shared equally with both members of the couple?
It sounds like neither one of them are a real prize - he for being a jerk who just let her keep going on, and she for having her head in the sand and not discussing the issue of children and listening when he said no, I don't want kids.
Ok, this is really bugging me, sorry for the multiple posts.
Wouldn't it show up in HER fertility tests that her 'pipes' were working just fine, and that she didn't NEED to go through the treatment? What doctor would treat a woman whose reproductive system was working just fine - releasing viable eggs on time, etc? Again, I don't have any experience with this, so I'm asking.
I smell a rat here. The more I think about it, the more I suspect that there's more to this story than we're hearing/reading.
To answer your question PonyChaser, sometimes a woman can be perfectly healthy and have nothing wrong with her but for whatever reason an embryo won't stick.