Port-au-Prince, Haiti, March 16, 2018 - "At 55, I already have four children. I realized that I do not have enough resources to take care of more mouths in my family. So, I decided to do it. Lamour Denis, married for 20 years, talked this way after the vasectomy surgery for which he obtained the approval of his wife.

It was on March 13, 2018, in one of the clinics of the Association for the Promotion of the Haitian Family (Profamil), at Martin Luther King Avenue, in Port-au-Prince, as a prelude to the world day of vasectomy, on November 13th.

For this event supported by UNFPA, Profamil, together with World Vasectomy Day, had hoped to reach 25 men, but there were much more.

"We had three teams of vasectomy surgeons with commodities for 25 people, but there were more than 100 people to register, and we had 83 vasectomies, compared to only 18 last year," the Director of Profamil said. What makes Dr. Gianni De Castro say that there is an awareness at the level of the community.

"Fifteen minutes were enough for each of the interventions, which were conducted without scalpel and by two of the leading specialists in this practice," the Head of Profamil adds.

The promotional audio-visual spot for this activity did it not say, with a hint of humor, that "Vazektomi pi rapid pase yon blokis Kanape Vè" (an operation in vasectomy lasts less than a traffic jam at Canapé Vert, suburbs located east of Port-au-Prince).

Marlène Louis chose to accompany her husband. She seems very aware of the importance of family planning. "It would be so much better if everyone on their own made arrangements to plan their lives in relation to the number of children they wanted to have," she says.

Vasectomy is a surgical procedure to obtain sterilization in men. It involves ligating the vas deferens, which are the channels that "carry" the spermatozoa from their place of production in the testicles to the urethra, through which the semen is ejected.

Vasectomy is one of the family planning methods that UNFPA supports in Haiti. UNFPA considers family planning as a human right that is central to development. This right’s perspective “by choice not by chance” means deciding if, when and how many children to have should be a choice that everyone can make throughout their lives.

Profamil and World Vasectomy Day, through such initiatives, wish to achieve a balance in the use of contraceptive methods in Haiti.

"The goal is to surpass the bar of three thousand vasectomies a year across," said the Executive Director of Profamil, while believing it to be an achievable goal.