The most reliable way for a man to make sure that he doesn't father any more children is to get a vasectomy. One word of advice is to make sure that the doctor who performs your surgery has a lot of successful experience. When done correctly by an experienced physician, as few as 1 in 1,000 vasectomies fail to do their job and that is a pretty good success rate. Evidence has indicated however that when doctors rarely perform this routine procedure the success rate is much higher than, sometimes as high as 17%.

Sperm are made in the male testes and stored in an adjacent sac called the epididymis, once released they travel through a small tube called the vas deferens. Inside your abdomen, the vas connects with the semen-producing prostate gland and seminal vesicles adjacent to the bladder. From this point it is ready to make babies but the vasectomy is performed to make sure that there are no sperm present in the ejaculate to succeed in making any babies.

The process of the surgery itself consists of the doctor locating the vas which he does in a kneading motion until he finds it. Once the vas is located the doctor will poke a hole with a needle into the scrotum and uses tiny clamps to pull out a short length of vas. Surgeons have used a variety of techniques to cut, inactivate, and close the two ends of the vas. The most popular technique is the "intraluminal cauterization with fascial interposition." This consists of the doctor slicing the vas in two and then he would pull up the fascia which is the tissue surrounding the tube, and add clamps or sutures it over the tube end. Sewing up the tube prevents these microscopic channels to reconnect later on allowing sperm to find their way through these micro channels and into the semen.

About a half a million vasectomies are performed each year in the U.S. Even though a vasectomy is cheaper, faster, and safer, still more women get tubal ligations than men get vasectomies. Many studies indicate that this is because of a lopsided healthcare system that affords these surgeries to women more so than to men. A vasectomy takes about ten minutes to complete and costs less than $1,000. Planned Parenthood charges a much reduced fee for the same procedure, on average about $100.