Urologists explain how Antonio Cromartie is having kids even after getting a vasectomy
703SHARES
SHARE
TWEET
EMAIL
By:
Charles Curtis | May 15, 2017 3:57 pm
Follow @bycharlescurtis
Minutes after I hit “publish” on
a post about NFL free agent cornerback Antonio Cromartie fathering yet another child with his wife Terricka, the phone rang with an answer to a question I’d posed: Just how was he continuing to have kids — his reported 14th is on the way — despite having a vasectomy years ago?
I reached out to the American Urological Association, who put me in touch with Dr. Ajay Nangia of University Kansas Health System and Dr. Jay Sandlow of the Medical College of Wisconsin. And it turns out there can be situations when a vasectomy doesn’t quite work the way it’s supposed to.
Nangia explained that after the procedure, patients are told they have to use birth control afterwards for three months and then come back for a follow-up appointment to make sure they have what they call a “zero count” of sperm.
“We don’t know if he got any confirmation of his ‘zero’,” Nangia said. “Surely by the fact that he had one kid after his vasectomy should have been a red flag.”
The other factor there is that even after a man is found to have a “zero count,” there’s a 1 in 2,000 chance of pregnancy.
But there’s also the fact that the human body can do some extraordinary things. It’s also possible for something call “recanalization” to take place, in which the scar tissue in the blocked or tied-off end can form little holes in them and allow fluids — the ones used to procreate — to flow through.
With all of that said, Sandlow added that although vasectomies aren’t perfect, these issues shouldn’t make us dismiss the procedure entirely.
“The message we want to get across to people is that vasectomies are a very effective and safe form of contraception,” Dr. Sandlow said. “While nothing is 100 percent, it’s actually at the lowest failure rate of any form of contraception.”
