By: Garland M. Baker B.
Exclusive to A.M. Costa Rica
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The free sexual atmosphere of Costa Rica can have negative consequences when sex tourists and expats inadvertently create offspring and then either turn their backs or leave not knowing what they have done.
One way to curb this is with a vasectomy, but many men fear this procedure. They believe it will do something to their manhood. Cultural mores also influence a man's decision to take the step. Often, women have their say too. Some of them also believe a man is lesser if he is not functioning fully.
Of three women interviewed last week in a beauty salon, one felt God made it clear in the Bible that a man should not sterilize himself. Another, one who is allergic to all types of contraception, said she felt her husband should have had a vasectomy before she had four kids. She is having a very hard time feeding them in these scant economic times. Her husband was in the salon too. When asked what he thought, he said he felt contraception was her responsibly, not his. He, too, is very religious and feels it is more important for the man to be able to reproduce than the woman.
The youngest of the three women, a 23-year-old unwed mother of an 8-year-old daughter, knows a male friend who underwent the procedure, and she said she thought it was very responsible on his part to do so. He already has three children with three different women.
Unbelievably, vasectomies and salpingectomies — the surgical removal of one or both fallopian tubes in a woman — were illegal in Costa Rica until the year 2002. The illegality of the practice came under Article 123 of the Costa Rican criminal code. That year, the constitutional court ruled the procedures were legal. Individual voluntary sterilization is a person's personal right, said the court. Only then did the country even start keeping public statistics on the procedure.
Dr. Arturo Cabezas López, a pioneer in family medicine in Costa Rica, brought the two procedures to Costa Rica in 1953. In an interview Friday, he told a story that changed his life and guided his practice until retirement. Today, he is 86 years old and retired only a few years ago. Cabezas went to study medicine in the United States in 1947. He returned to Costa Rica to practice as an intern in 1950. He said, in the interview, that one day a woman came to see him with one child in her arms and another clinging to her shirt. She was in tears. He asked her how he could help her and what the problem was. She told him she was pregnant and did not want to have any more children because she could not feed the ones she had.
This event affected the physician so much that he returned to the United States and, along with his other training, he took it upon himself to learn how to do vasectomies and postpartum salpingectomies. When he returned to Costa Rica in 1953, he performed the first vasectomy and in 1955 the first salpingectomy.
Remember, these two procedures were against the law until 2002. This physician did most of the operations free of charge for many years. He even traveled deep into the country's farming communities to offer the service to those who did not want to have any more children. He said that during the Carazo presidency from 1978 to 1982, Rodrigo Carazo Odio found out about Cabezas' practices and personally went to the legislature to have him stopped. When the Catholic Church found out, the local bishop prohibited the procedures. Both cases did nothing more than give the physician some very positive free advertising.
Why is this important to expats?
Well, Latin men tend to have fewer vasectomies than Anglo-Saxon men. They believe it will do something to the maleness. In the year 2007 only 1,238 were done in public hospitals in Costa Rica. This is four times the amount done in 2003, but still insignificant relative to the adult man population of the country.
However, Latin men should not be singled out as the unenlightened or the overly macho. Other foreign men and even those— maybe especially those — coming from the United States feel they are God's gift to women, especially Latin women.
Some come to play because Costa Rica is such a famous sex tourism destination. Even after a local television station and this newspaper covered the story regarding massage parlors pimping prostitutes in direct violation of criminal laws, virtually nothing was done to curb the trade. In fact, the establishments that were closed, opened again within days with new wheelchair access for the handicapped. The businesses were cited for municipal violations, not the pimping of prostitutes.
Others come to Costa Rica to play around with the local women. Not necessarily prostitutes — because it is common knowledge women of many nationalities can be found here, and they have a reputation of being very friendly with men from the United States. Among these men, some use condoms and others do not if they do not have to. When they are used, it is usually to protect against disease, not for contraception. For the ones that do not use protection, some of them couldn't care less if a woman gets pregnant. Many of them just get on a plane to return home and leave Costa Rica behind.
Some expat men living here permanently play around too. Many of them are older and hook up with younger females. Some women get pregnant and have children. Many do not think of what will happen to the women and the children they produce after they are dead. Many are living on their Social Security and nothing more. They do not have anything to leave a mother and the children they produce here. What often happens, the mother is forced into prostitution and the children into street crime.
Article first published in A.M. Costa Rica on February 16, 2009.
