Get Pregnant After a Tubal Ligation

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Joshua Vogel with Carolina Ob-Gyn, a division of Wilmington Health Associates. And I'm going to talk to you today about getting pregnant after a tubal ligation. This is actually a very difficult thing to approach, but it is possible. Assumedly, one had made a decision when they had their tubal ligation that they did not want to be pregnant anymore, and so tubal ligation in all its forms is intended to be permanent. Fixing that is not easy, but there are ways to do it. Depending on which technique you had done for your tubal ligation is going to determine your chances of successful tubal reversal. The most traditional way for a woman to try to get pregnant is to do a tubal ligation reversal which is a surgery that is quite expensive, lengthy to put the tubes back together, to remove the part that was damaged during the tubal ligation and try to create a patent fallopian tube that can carry an egg to the uterus. And to the best of circumstances, this surgery results in a successful pregnancy 70 percent of the time. Another option that is more commonly taken today is in vitro fertilization or IVF to simply leave the damaged tubes the way they are and bypass them. This, of course, is also expensive and difficult, but is essentially the only other option aside from good luck. Sometimes patients do get pregnant after tubal ligation without doing any of these. That is an unintended consequence and not, certainly, very reliable. We would rather that actually not happen. This has been a discussion today of getting pregnant after tubal ligation."