I love 30 Rock. Despite her politics, I love Tina Fey. She’s so dang clever, and freakin’ hilarious. She gets a ton of mileage out of the ugly duckling writer thing–even though everyone knows she cleans up nice.

Well, I was watching 30 Rock a couple weeks ago, and low and behold, one of the main themes was vasectomies. The Big Snip. Here we go again, I think. Nothing is sacred any more, and nothing promotes family and the beauty of children. Bugger. Stupid 30 Rock, and  stupid culture of death. This is particularly poignant for me because someone I know is considering a vasectomy, despite the moral and physical dangers (please pray for this person).  He just doesn’t know. Little did I know the way the story would develop…

There were too many killer lines in the episode to note them here, but I’ll say that the real highlight of the show is when Tracy Morgan (playing a  caricature of himself, “Tracy Jordan”) is about to go under the knife when the anesthetic–which causes him to hallucinate–induces a alternative universe for him in the form of a Cosby Show life featuring Tracy. In the scene Tracy walks in the the back door to a replica of the the famous Cosby kitchen, and his 30 Rock son, playing Theo, throws a his stuff onto a pile of garbage. Dialogue is initiated, and the place is a mess. Bill (Tracy) inquires about Sondra, Vanessa and Rudi, and  the 30 Rock version of Theo reveals that there’s no Sondra, no Vanessa, no Rudy. There’s no girls. They were never born. Enter vasectomy, stage right!

Essentially, Bill/ Tracy realizes how women civilize and balance out the family, and he comes out of the hallucination saying, “I need a baby girl, I need a baby girl….” You can guess (or watch) the rest.

The bottom line is that the writers of 30 Rock portrayed the utterly selfish motivations for getting a vasectomy (or any birth control in general, actually), and the life-changing potential for children, not to mention the semi-subtle fact that women and men are different, and that women compliment men for the better.

Can you imagine the comic potential if they’d actually introduced the dangers of vasectomies, not the least of which is spiritual alienation from God forbidding one from receiving Holy Communion (for Catholics) and an increase in auto-immune diseases and cancer?

Thinking about the big snip? Do a little research here:

• The Hurtful Consequences
• General overview, Q&A on Vasectomies (oops, not 100% effective, btw)
• What Sterilization did to us, and Sterilization Reversal: an act of healing: the awesome testimony of a retired Naval officer who regretted his vasectomy from the beginning, and his resulting journey to cure his inexplicable depression. For them, it wasn’t about having more children, but simply restoring his manhood and obeying God. I loved this story. Hearing a military man–someone of inherent vigor, virtue and quality–tell his story and regret brought me to tears.