KANSAS CITY, Mo. — With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, conversations around women and contraceptives have ruled the headlines.
For the other half of the population, TMJ4's sister station KSHB 41 News in Kansas City found out the inquiries for male care are high too.
“I didn’t ever envision myself talking about this, but it feels good,” Lyon Lenk said.
In the shade of his backyard, surrounded by four-pawed furry friends, 35-year-old Lenk doesn’t take priceless things for granted.
“You have to give it some serious thought,” he said. “We just want the basics, to have this yard and a choice in how our lives look like.”
One of those priceless moments is when he proposed to his fiancee with a family diamond smuggled from Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation.
“We got engaged at the beginning of the pandemic, because there’s just no one else I want to do this life thing with,” he said. “Kelsey is everything to me, I’ve never met a kinder, beautiful person.”
Which is why he’s sharing their decision in lieu of his fiancee’s medical history and the abortion ban.
“We’ve talked about me getting a vasectomy,” he said. “I’ve got to contemplate what could potentially be a lifesaving procedure for the person I love the most.”
Lenk says he knows the mass of his decision, has done the research and talked to his family and friends.
“It’s not a decision I make lightly, I’ll say that,” he said.
Dr. Christian Hettinger is a Urologist at the Kansas City Urology Care, where there are about two dozen clinics across the Kansas City area.
“One of our office managers said get ready,” Hettinger said. “Since Friday, we’re up 900% in people looking to get a vasectomy."
The demand for vasectomy consults drastically increasing across both Missouri and Kansas.
Hettinger gave an example from just a single clinic’s calls for consults over the weekend.
“Typically, it’s about three phone calls over a weekend, over this past weekend it was 50 calls looking for vasectomies,” he said.
Hettinger says he will tell his patients the same thing.
“It should be viewed as a permanent form of sterilization, it’s not something that’s a good temporary fix if you will,” he said. “It’s not something I would plan to have done and then reversed in the future.”
Lenk talked more about the decision to get the procedure.
"It’s not right for everybody," he said. "Either I get this, or we risk her being denied a procedure down the line and that’s unacceptable to me, so it’s not a sacrifice, it’s the right thing to do.”
