I Had a Tubal Ligation. Can I Reverse It?

Tubal ligation — having your tubes tied — is an effective form of birth control. It’s meant as a permanent form of birth control, but about 12% of people regret having the procedure.

If you had a tubal ligation but now want to have a baby, tubal reversal surgery may be an option for you.

At CARE Fertility in Bedford and Fort Worth, Texas, our reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialists perform tubal ligation reversal procedures. Here, we cover the tubal reversal procedure, who’s a candidate, and other infertility treatments if you’re not.

About tubal ligation reversal

When you have your tubes tied, your surgeon cuts or blocks the fallopian tubes, stopping your eggs from joining with sperm and preventing fertilization. It’s a sterilization procedure and is 99% effective at preventing unintended pregnancies.

Tubal ligation reversal restores fertility by reopening the fallopian tubes, allowing for fertilization of the egg so you can get pregnant. During the reversal, our surgical specialists reconstruct the fallopian tube to open the passageway and allow the egg to travel through. 

The procedure takes up to two hours, and you go home the same day. Though recovery varies, you can go back to light-duty work within a week and resume most of your usual activities within two weeks after the procedure.

Are you a candidate for tubal reversal?

We conduct a thorough physical to help determine whether we can restore your fertility with the tubal ligation reversal. We only perform the procedure if we think you have a good chance of getting pregnant following fallopian tube reconstruction.

We take your age, health history, and original tubal ligation procedure into consideration. Your ability to get pregnant decreases as you get older. You may also have a more difficult time getting pregnant if you have a health issue that affects fertility, such as endometriosis or uterine fibroids. 

If we suspect that it may be a challenge for you to get pregnant, we may suggest other infertility treatments rather than tubal reversal. 

In some cases, we may not realize you aren’t a candidate for tubal reversal until we attempt to reopen your fallopian tubes during the procedure. If we can’t properly reconstruct the tubes because they’re too damaged or too short, we won’t proceed with the reversal procedure.

Other fertility options

Though you can have your tubal ligation reversed, it may not be the best infertility treatment for you. Because of improvements with in vitro fertilization (IVF), tubal reversals aren’t common. You may have more success getting pregnant with IVF than undergoing the surgery. 

With IVF, we fertilize your eggs or donor eggs with your partner’s sperm or donor sperm. We then incubate the eggs in the lab or use an INVOcell® (an FDA-cleared medical device for fertility via intravaginal culture) and place the eggs and sperm in your vagina to incubate — a procedure called effortless IVFtm that our own specialists at CARE Fertility developed.

If you’re unable to carry a baby, you may consider using a gestational surrogate. 

Tubal ligation doesn’t have to be permanent. If you’re having regrets about your sterilization surgery and want to learn more about tubal reversal, call or request an appointment online at the office nearest you today.