Louis to the industrial outposts of Springfield and Joplin in southwest Missouri, I see dozens of men of all ages, professions and political inclinations file through, seeking Guarín’s “fast, effective, stress-free, … no-needle, no-scalpel” vasectomies. Over three days on the road with him, traveling from St. trailer is outfitted with running water, a bathroom and a printer, and festooned with giant letters that read, “Honk if you had your vasectomy.” The vehicle has gone viral online as “The Nutcracker,” a cheeky moniker Guarín’s friends came up with, though he thinks “The Myth Cracker” is more fitting. Though he usually stays in Iowa, this time he’s touring Missouri as part of an agreement with Planned Parenthood, parking his vasectomy-mobile in clinic parking lots. Guarín calls it a “vasectomy revolution.” In the 48 hours after Dobbs, traffic on his website jumped 250 percent in the following month, the number of vasectomies he performed doubled. On TikTok, the hashtag #vasectomy, which includes clips of women who assemble celebratory care packages for their partners, has been viewed 650 million times. Although there is scant national data on this surge, hospitals and doctors across the country are reporting a marked increase in both calls and appointments for the procedure, especially among young, childless men. It’s something many couples are turning to after GOP-controlled legislatures have fully banned abortion in 13 states. In the months after the Dobbs decision they called a doctor’s office to book an appointment for a vasectomy, a form of contraception that involves severing the vas deferens so that sperm cells cannot leave the testicles and thus cannot fertilize an egg. Dalliance was among the many Americans who asked themselves what they could do to prevent those pregnancies in the first place. Many women, especially in deep-red states like Missouri, responded with immediate alarm to the Dobbs decision, imagining how they would navigate an unwanted pregnancy. And that, Dalliance says, “made the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy much worse.” Twenty minutes after the Dobbs ruling in June, Missouri banned all abortions, except in cases of medical emergencies.
But, he says, it was a single event this year that prompted him to make the 2½-hour trek from Kansas City to make sure he couldn’t have biological children: the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. He doesn’t feel like it’s right to bring a child into this world, what with fears of climate Armageddon and democratic backsliding.
Outside in the parking lot, Dalliance tells me he’d long ago decided that he didn’t want any biological children, period. Guarín reaches into his mini-fridge and hands the newly sterilized trucker a can of Fanta as Dalliance heads out to score his post-op reward meal: a veggie burrito from Taco Bell. The tension eases and then Dalliance is all done. Guarín distracts Dalliance with small talk, asking about everything from his longest trucking assignment (1,600 miles from northern Texas to Los Angeles) to his dating history (Dalliance is polyamorous) to his thoughts on Elon Musk’s electric truck (“He’s basically the dude that sells the monorail in The Simpsons.”).
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