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.”
Other Canadian doctors, like Dr. Pierre Boucher in Montreal and Dr. Neil Pollock in Vancouver, perform thousands of vasectomies a year. Both told CBC news they’ve noticed a similar trend at their practices.
Their observations coincide with Canada’s steeply declining fertility rate. In 2023, that rate was 1.26 children born per woman – Canada’s lowest on record, according to Statistics Canada.
In …