No Scalpel Vasectomy Procedure

Vasectomy is an outpatient procedure done under local anesthesia. After the local anesthesia is injected, small cuts (incisions) in the scrotum (the sac that holds the testes) are made. The vas deferens—two tubes that carry sperm to the penis—are then cut, tied, or blocked.

A ‘no scalpel vasectomy’ is where, instead of cutting the skin of the scrotum with long incisions,  small puncture holes are made. The tubes that carry sperm are pulled through the holes and tied off and cut. A non-scalpel vasectomy may not require stitches, but is a misnomer and may not mean that there is no scalpel/cutting device involved as small puncture wounds still have to be made in the scrotum in order to gain access to the vas deferens tubes.

After a vasectomy, a man will still produce semen (the fluid that comes out of his penis when he has sex). A man will need to return  about three months after the vasectomy for semen analysis testing to ensure there are no sperm in his semen. It takes about three months to completely clear the sperm out of the man’s reproductive system. A man should use another type of birth control (like a condom) until it is confirmed by a semen analysis that there are no longer any sperm in his semen.