Snip, snip, grin, grin, say no more

Wednesday, 1st November 2006

Toby Young is under orders from his wife to get a vasectomy. But why should men agree to biological redundancy? What about their duty to keep up the birthrate? And what about the pain?

In any event, why should I — or my wife, for that matter — practise birth control? Admittedly, it might make our lives a bit easier, but it seems highly irresponsible in the light of present population trends. The comparatively low birth rates of white Caucasians in Western Europe — particularly middle-class ones like me — is often described as a ‘ticking bomb’. According to Time magazine, the Muslim birth rate in Europe is three times higher than that of non-Muslims and even by the most conservative estimates the Muslim population of France will double in the next ten years. As the historian Bernard Lewis has said, ‘With current trends, Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century.’

Is this really the right time to be advocating the voluntary sterilisation of white European males?

Perhaps the real reason I’m so opposed to vasectomies, though, is because of my father’s sixth child. He was widowed at the age of 77, having already done his demographic duty by siring five children.

Nevertheless, he remarried at the age of 79 and — aged 80 — produced a daughter. He lived for another six years and throughout that time the presence of this miracle child was a source of enormous pleasure to him. (She is now ten and I’m looking forward to the day she’s old enough to babysit.) If my father had had ‘the snip’, my half-sister wouldn’t exist.

In the end, I managed to persuade my wife to postpone the discussion, at least until we’d produced a third child.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But you’re still having a vasectomy.’

Toby Young will be discussing ‘the snip’ on Radio 4’s Off the Page at 11.30 p.m. on 19 November.