Sperm Banking at the Time of Your Reversal (Part 1)

We are pleased to offer sperm banking at no additional charge to our patients at the time of your reversal here at ICVR. If there should be rare problems or scarring down the road, it would be nice to have sperm frozen, “just in case” which can save you many thousand of dollars. The good news is that it is very rare to need the sperm frozen at the time of vasectomy reversal.

Many men do not have fluid that is bankable during their surgery. We can only bank and freeze sperm that is good enough with a good fluid volume, high numbers of sperm and high percent that are moving (motile). We need to see all three to be able to bank fluid during your reversal. This is unpredictable and can vary from person-to-person or even side-to-side.

We keep your partner up-to-date throughout the surgery as to what we find and whether or not it’s good enough to freeze. if you wish, we can usually harvest sperm from the testicle but there are pros and cons to this approach.

Two possible ways to use the frozen sperm.

Banked sperm can be used for two different assisted technologies, IUI or IVF.

If we get large volumes of fluid with very high counts and motility then this may be good enough for simply instilling the sperm up into the uterus on the day of ovulation. This is called “intra-uterine insemination” or IUI. This is relatively inexpensive, with up to a 10 to 15% chance for pregnancy per IUI attempt depending on many male and female factors. It is usually uncommon to get enough fluid volume, sperm counts or motility for IUI quality specimens.

Smaller volumes of fluid or a lesser quality of sperm can sometimes be frozen to be used for “in vitro fertilization” (IVF). This involves stimulating the female with high doses of hormones to get the ovaries to push a large number of eggs that can be retrieved. The frozen sperm are then thawed and one sperm is then injected microscopically into each egg, which usually results in an embryo. These embryos are then placed into the uterus after an additional round of hormones. Though this is truly a modern miracle, it can be extremely expensive and there are added risks to the babies and mother. There are some couples that will not consider this for personal, financial or religious reasons.

If you have any questions about banking or your situation, you can call us at
888-722-2929 or email info@dadsagain.com.