V-Day: Why I decided to get a vasectomy

AT dawn on June 6, 1944, more than 150,000 Allied troops began landing in Normandy, the largest seaborne invasion in history, and a turning point in the Second World War.

It’s hard to imagine the fear those young men must have felt as they approached the shore in their landing craft. I was thinking of them 70 years later to the day, as I made my way to Blackrock Hall Health Centre in Mahon, trying to imagine what they mast have felt, hoping to put my own fear in perspective.

I tried to convince myself I was launching my own campaign to free myself from nature’s tyrannical plan to overpopulate this planet, that what I was doing was a heroic deed. But nothing lessened my fear. I was terrified.