KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KSHB) — Lyon Lenk doesn’t take priceless things for granted.
“You have to give it some serious thought,” he said. “We just want the basics, to have this yard and a choice in how our lives look like.”
One of those priceless moments is when he proposed to his fiancee with a family diamond smuggled from Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation.
“We got engaged at the beginning of the pandemic because there’s just no one else I want to do this life thing with,” he said. “Kelsey is everything to me. I’ve never met a kinder, beautiful person.”
Following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Lenk decided to get a vasectomy due to his wife's medical history.
“We’ve talked about me getting a vasectomy,” he said. “I’ve got to contemplate what could potentially be a lifesaving procedure for the person I love the most.”
Dr. Christian Hettinger, a urologist at the Kansas City Urology Care, said they have been inundated with requests for information about vasectomies.
“Since Friday, we’re up 900% in people looking to get a vasectomy," he said.
The demand for vasectomy consults is drastically increasing across both Missouri and Kansas.
Hettinger gave an example from just a single clinic’s calls for consults over the weekend.
“Typically, it’s about three phone calls over a weekend," he said. "Over this past weekend, it was 50 calls looking for vasectomies."
Hettinger says he will tell his patients the same thing.
“It should be viewed as a permanent form of sterilization, it’s not something that’s a good temporary fix if you will,” he said. “It’s not something I would plan to have done and then reversed in the future.”
Lenk cautioned that a lot of consideration should go into the decision.
"It’s not right for everybody," he said. "Either I get this, or we risk her being denied a procedure down the line and that’s unacceptable to me, so it’s not a sacrifice, it’s the right thing to do.”
This story was originally reported by Megan Abundis on KSHB.com.
