Pregnancy risk following laparoscopic sterilization in nongravid and gravid women

A multicenter data set was analyzed to compare incidences of poststerilization pregnancies between women who were not pregnant and those who were pregnant at admission of laparoscopic sterilization. The 12-month life-table poststerilization pregnancy rate was 6.0 per 1,000 procedures for the 7,696 nongravid and 32.8 for the 1,703 gravid women, for a fivefold difference. The crude pregnancy rates were consistently higher for the gravid women when data were classified by tubal occlusion technique and by patients' sociodemographic characteristics. The difference in pregnancy rates between the two groups was reduced to 2.4-fold when analysis was limited to data sets from centers that admitted both groups of women and that performed sterilization by the same technique. Results of this analysis support previous studies suggesting that gravid women, especially postpartum patients, carry a higher pregnancy risk following sterilization.