Options after a Vasectomy: Vasectomy Surgery and Vasectomy Reversals

Written by Professor Owen

When considering a vasectomy reversal, you may get conflicting advice from interested parties who wish to put you off having a vasectomy reversal, with some information which is partially correct, but mostly done to frighten you.

The way it is done is this:-

If your parents had any sense when you were young they had you vaccinated and they had you immunised for certain things such as tetanus, whooping cough, paralysis and, as various infections came in and serums and anti-serums were developed, against various things such as meazles, which you didn’t get, but you see children getting these days. So, you can have immunisation (done by injecting ANTIGENS…which your body is then stimulated to make in your “Immune System” the ANTIBODIES to prevent you having these diseases. Everybody knows this, and it is a pity that although it used to be compulsory, the Government has removed some immunisations from being compulsory, and so people are still in danger of getting various diseases…because such protection lasts , because your system is “primed” by the circulating antibodies to resist that disease while you are alive.

You would not go overseas and go to an area where you could get cholera, or various other possibly fatal diseases if you could help itan help it, without having various checkups beforehand to make sure that you have the appropriate antigen injections which allow your body to protect you from getting these types of diseases by making the appropriate antibodies

Now, every time that you have the flu, a virus comes into you and when you finally get over the attack of the flu, the body has already made antibodies against that flu virus. You will not get that flu again.

There are other things like diphtheria for instance. Once you have had your set of injections as a child, you should not get diphtheria affecting your throat for the rest of your life because you keep the antibodies. Once they are made, they are repeatedly made by your immune system.

If you understand this, you will understand why men who have a vasectomy, will then be producing, from the age of about 11 or 12 a new protein substance from their sperm, which are developing at that stage.

The immune system of your body, which consists of white blood cells called lymphocytes going around in the the body’s blood vessels, suddenly senses a new protein it has never seen before, which are not the ones that you have grown up with over the last eleven or twelve years, and they collect these new bits of protein and then take them to the nearest lymph gland where they make antibodies against them to protect you from what they think is a foreign bacteria, now in the blood stream when it is only the cells that men make in their testicles as they mature into Men . That is called sperm antibodies..

So, every man who has a vasectomy, is almost guaranteed to have sperm attract the white cells to the foreign protein they are making, and make antibodies called sperm antibodies. This is a long winded explanation.

Men will have the sperm antibodies for the rest of their lives.

However, the antibodies only affect the sperm providing the sperm is out in the blood stream where the lymph cells are. Now, normally in an ordinary male, who has not had a vasectomy, there is very little in the way of leakage from the epididymis (which is the thinnest walled part of the male reproductive tract, made up of the testicle, the epididymis and the vas). The testicle and the epididymis can develop a few minor leaks and white cells can come in, sense that there is protein there, and make antibodies against it, which will be then present in the blood circulation.

This does not worry you because you make up to 18,000 quite immature cells every minute which will mature into sperms, if you are a Male, and they pass through a system from the testicle, maturing through the maturation canal (which is called the epididymis) and over a three month period, develop from a single cell to a cell with a body and a tail. It swims through the vagina and through the cervix at the end of the vagina into the uterus, through the uterus into the fallopian tube where it can meet an egg (ova) and possibly fertilise it.

Every man that has had a vasectomy therefore, is almost guaranteed to have sperm antibodies for the rest of his life following a vasectomy because the pressure exerted by tying off the vas, is reflected back to the testicle and some of the testicular working parts and some of the working parts of the epididymis stretch a bit from the increased pressure put on them by tying off of the vas, making the flow of sperm stop. Some of them are absorbed by white blood cells in that area , and they return into the blood stream and the immune dystem makes the antibodies.

Having REVERSED the VASECTOMIES on more than 5,000 men, that is, operating on 10,000 sides of men, all of whom have sperm antibodies, you may ask, did it make any difference to the results? Did those sperm antibodies that a man is almost guaranteed to have, make any difference?

The answer is NO!, it did not!

In America some women are so worried about sperm and sperm antibodies that they get a test on their male companion who says, “don’t worry I can’t get you pregnant, I have had a vasectomy” and the only way that she can find out if he really has had a Vasectomy easily is to have a blood test to see if he has sperm antibodies. If he has lots of sperm antibodies, then he has had a vasectomy. That is how they tell if he is fairly safe from getting her pregnant. He is still not safe from having AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases.

When somebody tells you that it no good having a vasectomy because you have sperm antibodies and we are going to test and see how strong the number (there are at least twenty five different sperm antibodies of which only a few are reactive to some of the tissue inside the female reproductive tract), don’t worry about It. We took sperm antibodies for the first two years when we started doing vasectomy reversals in 1971 and all the men had sperm antibodies, but we achieved an 80% baby rate in those early years, and are continuing to achieve very similar sorts of results.

We can do over 5,000 men’s vasectomies and have around about 80% of them go on to have children, not just one child but sometimes two later on, and sometimes three ,or twins etc. All this talk you hear from Gynaecologists and other Drs about how dangerous sperm antibodies are does not stand up to being the factor that prevents any good Vasectomy Reversal from not working.(although they are correct, vasectomised men do have sperm antibodies). In a well done vasectomy reversal, where there is no spill of the sperms when you join the tubal parts together, or later if it leaks, operations that we do with exceptional care, scientifically and with our unique, proven techniques, it won’t affect the results.

There are still of 1-2% of those cases where unusual antibodies produced which are specific and work against some tissues in some woman…. which we repeat is with a different form of antibodies, and really this type are so rare that they should not even be considered, but they must be explained to patients.

So the end result is, don’t believe anybody that tells you that because you have had a vasectomy, it wont work because you have sperm antibodies. Those antibodies will not stop a good operation of reversal from working to produce a baby or more than one.

Who else gets sperm antibodies?

I have had a thump in my groin by a cricket ball / soccer ball / football – could I have sperm antibodies?

Yes, anyone who has had a solid injury or infection in the scrotum can have sperm antibodies as a result of that trauma.

They too will not influence the results of our Reversals

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