Urologist says vasectomy consults have increased by 900% since Roe v. Wade was overturned

Lyon 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.”

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Lenk decided to get a vasectomy due to his wife’s medical history.

“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.”

Dr. Christian Hettinger, a urologist at Kansas City Urology Care in North Kansas City, Missouri, said they have been inundated with requests for information about vasectomies.

“Since Friday, we’re up 900% in people looking to get a vasectomy,” he said.

The demand for vasectomy consults is 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,” he said. “Over this past weekend, it was 50 calls looking for vasectomies.”

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 cautioned that a lot of consideration should go into the decision.

“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.”

By Megan Abundis, KSHB.com.