Why Is Sterilization Wrong?

          Yesterday was “World Vasectomy Day.”  “World Vasectomy Day” has become a thing in the past few years, part of a global effort to promote male sterilization, culminating in this observance on the third Friday of November.

          The Church teaches that vasectomies are immoral.  Why?  Two reasons:

          First, Christian teaching has always been – and the Church retains that constant Christian teaching – that God has connected the procreative and unitive meanings of the sexual act which for man deliberately to put asunder is wrong.  It is playing God.  As Pope Francis reminded us, “creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift.”  We, too, are created in a certain way by God.  “In the beginning” God makes the human person male and female, thus building a complementarity between them that seeks unity.  He also blessed them with and commanded them to be fertile.  All this is obvious in Genesis 1:26-28, where it is presented as reflecting God’s own image and likeness: totally giving as Persons in life-giving Love.  It is paradoxical that moderns want a pristine ecology but seek to change themselves with chemicals, surgery, hormones, or barriers to prevent the natural function of the bodies God gave them.  It is the same logic that tries to justify amputating healthy breasts or penises in the name of "gender-affirming care." It is one thing to perform a mastectomy when a woman is suffering from breast cancer, a disease in that tissue.  It is another to remove healthy breasts in the name of a psychological claim one is "in the wrong body."

          Second, sterilization involves a second element: mutilation.  Sterilization is accomplished by destroying healthy tissue, cutting the vas deferens in the male, the fallopian tubes in the female.  These organs are not diseased, they are not healthy.  They are in fact functioning normally.  It is the fact that they are functioning normally, doing what God designed them to do, that is the reason for mutilating them in sterilization.  The tubes are not diseased nor pathological.  Nor is fertility a disease. It is not even meaningless or neutral: it is good, part of the way we have been made by the hand of God.  It is a natural and normal dimension of a normally functioning human being: constant in the male, cyclical in the female.  To reject it is to reject our created selves and to refuse to love the other in the full truth of how (s)he has been created.

          “World Vasectomy Day” is observed because its adherents think that the fertile human being is something bad.  What we Catholics need to recover and communicate to others is the understanding that properly values and communicates to others the meaning of human sexuality as God’s gift.