Following the Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, a mobile Planned Parenthood clinic is offering free vasectomies in Missouri, where abortion is illegal.
Dr. Esgar Guarin runs the mobile clinic, a vehicle he shares his friends have dubbed "the Nutcracker", and will partner with Planned Parenthood to perform 60 procedures in St Louis, Springfield, and Joplin over the course of just three days. After his weekend in Missouri, he plans to take the clinic to Iowa and perform another 40 vasectomies for free. His clinic in Des Moines will continue to offer the procedure at a discounted rate.
“It’s a very particular moment in reproductive rights in the United States. And we need to we need to talk about it,” Guarin said.
Despite costing less and having a shorter recovery time, Guarin added that vasectomies are performed less frequently than the procedure for female sterilization (tubal litigation).
As a member of the medical advisory board for World Vasectomy Day, Guarin has offered free vasectomies during the November weekend for several years before the SCOTUS ruling, though the Dobbs v. Jackson case has sparked an exponential increase in patients seeking sterilization.
Planned Parenthood of St. Louis performed 10 vasectomies in July of 2021. That same month in 2022, they performed 42 procedures. Female sterilization also increased from 3 to 18. While Planned Parenthood does not have statistics for this year available yet, a spokesperson told The Guardian that their website has seen a 53 percent increase of searches related to vasectomies in the past 100 days.
Dr. Koushik Shaw of Austin, Texas revealed that his urology institute is performing 50 percent more procedures following the Dobbs ruling, as many men have realized how the abortion ban impacts them as well.
“It really pushed family planning to the forefront of people’s thoughts," he said.
In response to patients traveling from out of state to receive abortions, Planned Parenthood also announced plans to launch their first-ever mobile abortion clinic. The 37-foot RV will have a fully functional exam room, and will travel along the southern border of Illinois, as well as into Missouri.
Dr. Margaret Baum, medical director of Planned Parenthood in Southwest Missouri, made the decision to partner with Guarin's mobile vasectomy clinic. She recalled conversations with patients about sterilization, citing their anxieties over the country's changing political landscape.
“I think people are afraid, number one, about abortion not being accessible, which is a very real and legitimate fear and in the reality for a large part of folks in our country," she said. "And then I think people are also really afraid that what else might be next.”
