Has anyone gotten pregnant or heard of anyone who has gotten pregnant after a tubal ligation?
Yes. A friend of mine at an old job had a tubal after she had 5 kids. Number 6 came out 10 months later.
i did=]
I know three women who conceived a “surprise!” third child after a tubal.
Not a tubal, but a vasectomy. I know a couple that got pregnant not once but twice after he got a vasectomy - he even went to the doctor after she miscarried the first time and was assured that everything was good and proper. I believe their little girl is 3 or so now (and that he’s gotten a better doctor or a different form of birth control).
Yes, I’ve got a cousin conceived post-tubal.
The most effective form of permanent sterilization for women (besides hysterectomy, which is not generally performed for sterilization) is Essure, a tubal implant. It’s slightly more effective than a surgical tubal ligation. It is 99.74% effective, with zero pregnancies in clinical trials, compared to 99.5% for tubal ligation. However, it hasn’t been around as long as tubal ligation, so the numbers may change with more users and longer term users.
My mother, 15 years later.
Vasectomies are absolutely the way to go. I should know, I’ve had 4! The first three were all experimental for a new technique (headed for the third world so requiring far less equipment and intervention). I failed the first one and being the only failure in the study, they wanted to know why so they tried again and then an improved method before finaling doing the 4th the classic way. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend a vasectomy. Plus they aren’t reversible as such, but it is easy to extract sperm directly from the testes later to do IUI or IVF if another child is desired.
I knew a woman who had her tubes tied. She started acting all, for lack of a better word, “off.” She ask me to get her sweets and she was sick in the morning. And both things were things Jean never did. I said, “Jean are you pregnant.” She said, “Mark I have my tubes tied.”
Then she started to get really sharp pains in her abdomen. I said “I bet you’re pregnant.” Turns out she had a tubal pregnancy and had to get an operation.
From the pain she had it must be pretty awful
Yep. A friend of mine got pregnant with her third child after a tubal ligation. She said she thought she had cancer or something at first when her period stopped and she felt nauseated and exhausted all the time - it just didn’t occur to her that the ligation could have failed.
Vasectomy and tubal ligation are pretty damn good forms of birth control, but like everything else, they’re not 100%. As a rule, human bodies are geared towards trying to reproduce against all obstacles and odds.
Yes, had an ectopic pregnancy after a tubal ligation about 20 years ago. Very painful.
This types of threads always interest me. I feel like I know so many people who get pregnant while on birth control or using condoms, and swear they use the method correctly. However, I frequently assume that they were not in fact using the method correctly (because statistically I think it’s more likely).
However, it’s impossible to “use” tubal ligation incorrectly. So far I’ve counted 10 pregnancies after ligation mentioned in this thread. If it’s 99.5% effective (WhyNot’s figure), that means for every 200 couples having sex over a year, 1 will get pregnant in that year. So 10 pregnancies would be expected for 2000 people with tubal ligation over the course of a year.
Actually, I guess that number is pretty reasonable, given the traffic on this board and the time span we’re looking at (more than a year). Just something I think about.
We know exactly why I managed to get preggers after a tubal …
I had the old style, where they sort of bend the tube and rubber band it, which causes a sort of adhesion to close the tube. I had a tumor removed from the lower abdomen 10 years or so after the tubal, ended up with a bit of an infection, and when the tissues expanded from the whole mess, the adhesion and band on one side popped and oops. At least I was not pregnant with a tubal pregnancy, which had a seriously high chance of happening. And I found out fairly early, so I could have it dealt with.
There is a reason they started cutting the tube and cauterizing it =) apparently that was a sort of common happening.
The most common reason for vasectomy “failure” is actually non paternity (more obvious now with DNA testing, less so in the past when blood group was used as a paternity test).
I’d choose IUS (Mirena) over TL any day of the week- same failure rate, reversible and with the added bonus of lighter or absent periods.
But yes, given that a human ovum is this size [.] and a sperm is much smller, and that TL does nothing to decrease sperm motility or to prevent implantation of a blastocyst- well, you can see why failures happen, and why when it does fail the pregnancy tends to be ectopic.
There is no perfect contraceptive, and what is right for one person won’t be right for the next- so you basically pay your money and take your chances on whichever method you decide to use.
I never fail to be surprised by the number of people who are using “luck” as their contraceptive method of choice though 
:eek: I never thought of that. Huh.
Can I ask, why is it that hysterectomy isn’t done for contraception? That would give you the benefit of absent periods, as well, and be actually 100% effective, wouldn’t it? (I’m assuming they close off the end of the vagina somehow so sperm (and bacteria) aren’t going to enter the abdominal cavity after a hysterectomy, but I admit I could be wrong about that.)
Obviously, you’d have to select that patient carefully and she’d need to be absolutely sure she was post-childbearing, as she couldn’t carry even a donor egg, but it seems like there would be a non-zero number of women for whom this would be ideal. Like, say, me, who doesn’t want to risk a uterine rupture from my body’s habit of premature labor with a classic c-section scar. I’d be much happier if my uterus wasn’t present to betray me someday should my birth control fail!
I managed to get pregnant three times in two years. Once on the Pill, once using contraceptive foam and condoms TOGETHER (her name is Lisa), and once with an IUD. The pill and IUD pregnancies ended in miscarriages, and yes, I had been tested and found pregnant…this was back before the days of home pregnancy tests, the tests were sent off to a lab.
I know that I took that pill faithfully, and I know that I used double the amount of foam (as recommended by my doctor) and that Bill used a condom every time. And the IUD was still in place after my miscarriage. Birth control failures DO happen, but very few people will be as open about talking about them as I am. How many people will admit that their kids were BC failures, really?
Ooh, ooh! Yes, of course the Queen of TMI - by which I mean me - will. 
My eldest was conceived the first time I had consensual sex (which isn’t contraceptive, as anyone over the age of 11 knows, but it was still a kick in the teeth), while using a sponge, extra spermicide and a condom, which had no visible rip or tear in it when we were done.
My 0.0000000001% darling turns 18 in a week and a half. :smack:
By most studies, about half of all pregnancies are unplanned, and half of those are contraceptive failures. A little less than half of the unplanned pregnancies are terminated, and another 10-15% lost to miscarriage. That still leaves a whole lot of “oops” babies on the playground!
I joke that if I was an indian, and I had been able to actually carry the sprogs to term without dying I would have named them OrthoNovum Don’t work, OrthoNovum Don’t work, Rubber broke and You have got to be shitting me, I had a tubal ligation 10 years ago …
I hate it when people are all officious and tell you that you aren’t doing contraception correctly … at a personal level you can’t fuck up a tubal ligation … it isn’t like you can forget to take it, or pop it in, it just sort of is.
I think the hormonal BC can fail because there is no magical mean - every woman is different and just because a specific hormone level is deemed to be the magical number does not mean that it is the right level for her. I also think that the magical number can shift unpredictably so it isnt perhaps always a case of antibiotics, or the flu or anything predictable, just pure dumb anti-luck/luck [I know that some people consider any child a blessing, but they need to understand that some women consider it a seriously bad thing to happen]
(This thread is making me cross my legs tightly and glare suspiciously in Mr. Horseshoe’s direction.)