Delhi Economic Survey reports gaping gender gap in number of sterilisations conducted in 2022-23

Only little over 3% of the sterilisation procedures were performed on men in the national capital in 2022-23, according to the Delhi government’s Economic Survey released recently.

While only 375 men opted for a vasectomy in 2022-23, over 30 times that number — 11,037 women — underwent sterilisation in that financial year.

The trend, as per the data of previous economic surveys, has remained similar for the past many years. In 2021-22, 314 men were vasectomised, while 11,341 women were sterilised. Similarly, in 2020-21, 78 vasectomies were performed on men compared to the 7,806 sterilisations performed on women, and in 2019-20, 740 men were vasectomised while 17,652 women were sterilised.

‘Taboo topic’

Dr. M. Sivakami, a professor at the school of Health System Studies at TISS, told The Hindu that the glaring disparity between the rate of sterilisation of men and women is “not surprising”, because historically, the burden of contraception has always been borne by women.

“There is a lot of silence surrounding the subject of male contraception. Most men and even some women believe that men will experience a lower sex drive if they get a vasectomy,” she said.

Dr. Rinku Sengupta, a gynaecologist, added that the lack of conversation about male contraception forces women into getting sterilised.

“Most women, in order to avoid unplanned pregnancies, prefer to get sterilised instead of trying to convince their male partners to undergo the much simpler process of getting a vasectomy,” she said.

Tubal ligation, or sterilisation for women, is a far more intrusive and complicated process as compared to a vasectomy, Dr. Sengupta added. “A vasectomy involves a small procedure in the scrotal region, while to sterilise women, we have to perform an incision in the abdominal area, which may cause chronic pain in the pelvis and irregular periods,” she said.

For Dr. Sivakami, the lack of importance given to male contraception cannot simply be explained away by the fact that men play no role in childbearing. According to her, the “systemic failure” of family planning policies adopted by successive governments is a major contributor, too. “Past family policies have historically targeted women and conveniently kept men out of the conversation,” she said.

It is up to the government to attempt to narrow the gap between the usage of male and female contraceptive methods, she said, not just by allocating funds differently, but also by increasing human resources to enable more conversations around the subject. Regional languages should be used to communicate, she added, not just to women, but to couples and families, in order to try to actively include men in the responsibility of contraception.