Are Vasectomies As Effective As We Think? [POLL]

Recently I was talking to some ladies that run a local daycare and they gave me some information that could be very scary depending on your situation.

They said they knew several couples that had decided to stop having children so the husband had a vasectomy done. Everything was great for 3, to 5, to even 9 years and then the wife found herself pregnant. At some point the vasectomy stopped working which of course resulting in s surprise baby. Uh oh! This seems to be occurring A LOT. I can think of about 9 couples that have had an oops baby due to a vasectomy failing.

My husband has a vasectomy so I of course wanted to do some research to make sure we didn't end up with a surprise baby when I'm 45 years old. This is what I found:

Chance of Failure Between 6 and 72 Weeks:

According to livestrong.com Researchers from the CDC questioned over 500 fertile women about their experiences with pregnancy after their partner had a vasectomy.

Out of 540 women:

• six pregnancies occurred within five years
• three conceptions took place within 10 weeks of the vasectomy,

The other three pregnancies occurred at 20, 66, and 72 weeks post-vasectomy. The researchers concluded that the failure rate for every 1,000 vasectomies was 9.4 percent during the first year, and 11.3 percent for years two to five years.

Chances of Failure After 72 Weeks:

In the CDC study, no pregnancies were reported between 72 weeks and five years post-vasectomy. The CDC authors acknowledge that vasectomies do fail after five years, although they did not observe it in their study population.

Overall, vasectomies are most likely to fail in the first year after the procedure, usually within the first few months.