Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Sterilization
By Mayo Clinic staffThe reproductive life span for men and women encompasses many years. Healthy women are fertile until about the age of 50. Healthy men are fertile essentially throughout adult life. Sterilization was first introduced as a means of family planning for women 40 and older who had eight or more children. Sterilization became more common by the late 1960s, and today, many couples opt for sterilization as a permanent means of birth control.
Sterilization methods include:
- For women — tubal ligation and Essure coils
- For men — vasectomy
