In over 30 years of practice, Dr. Errol Billinkoff rarely saw a man without kids come into his Winnipeg clinic to get a vasectomy. But since the pandemic began, he says it's become an almost daily occurrence.
And he's not alone.
"At first, I thought I was the only one who was noticing this," Billinkoff, who brought a no-scalpel vasectomy procedure to Winnipeg in the early 1990s, told CBC News in a November interview.
"But I am part of an international chat group where doctors who do vasectomies participate and the topic came up, and it's like everybody notices it."
Chemical castration is not birth control. Firstly, it rarely actually results in complete sterility. Secondly, it's whole purpose is to remove sex drive and the ability to feel arousal. Chemical castration in men is closer to women taking an estrogen blocker than it is to hormonal birth control.
I guess if you consider abstinence to be birth control then you could call it birth control because it enforces abstinence. But ultimately the issue is just that sperm production is far less dependent on hormones than eggs being released. Hormonal changes in men can can easily result in a large reduction in fertility but it is very difficult to cause complete infertility short of physical means. Even trans women who are several years into hormone therapy (without srs obviously) can remain fertile.