Several years ago my younger sister expressed her anger for my fathering a child at 55.

“You should get a vasectomy.” She thought I was a fool for bringing another child onto the planet without a steady job. She was more right than wrong, but then women always are more right than men.

“I don’t need one.” I was back in the States and there was no danger of my having sex with the Rubenesque women of America. Back in Thailand with my new wife was another story.

“It’s not just to stop having babies. A vasectomy helps cut down on the risk of testicular cancer.” My sister researched everything she wanted to say following the old legal adage ‘never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer’.

“That may be so, but I can’t have a vasectomy, because I’m thinking of the human race.” While vasectomy is not castration, it sounds the same to men, although through the miracle of modern medicine there are procedures for vasectomy reversal.

“How so?” My sister was a lawyer. She wanter to hear my rationale.

“Say every man in the world is exterminated by a space virus and I’m the last man on Earth. I would be the only source of sperm on the planet and as such be required to seed every woman possible no matter what my age. The fate of humanity rests below my waist, so I have to safeguard against this seemingly distant possibility.” I had written a screenplay about the last man on Earth in the 90s. It ends with the character impregnating the last women. He was no Adam.

“You’re crazy.”

“That may be so, but I will protect mankind from extinction to my grave.” France considered vasectomy as a crime of self-mutilation until 2001.

“So no vasectomy?” I was being requestioned by an expert.

“Not a chance.”

Some things are best left the way they are, because the way they are is the way they;’re supposed to be.