According to recent news coverage and personal testimonies, hundreds of women have experienced adverse side effects from Essure – “the only non-surgical, permanent birth control available”.
How does it work? Metal coils are inserted in both fallopian tubes, causing a woman’s body to grow tissue through them, blocking the fallopian tubes. In most cases, this prevents pregnancy by making eggs unable to reach the uterus.
But Essure stories aren’t all happily finished families as the product owner, Bayer, would like you to think.
According to the safety warnings on their website, Essure doesn’t sounds terribly problematic. The adverse effects are, as they say, so rare that it’s unlikely to happen to an average person. Right?
But the women who have gone through horrible situations would tell you not to gamble with the risk. These stories include:
- Migraines
- Debilitating pain
- Early menopause
- Cysts
- “When you stand up it feels like someone’s taking your muscles or your insides and trying to pull them apart. It would take me to the floor.”
- And punctured organs (when the coil migrates outside the fallopian tube)
Many women have experienced unexplained health issues they attribute to Essure, and to top it off, a hysterectomy is usually their only given solution. They now have a support group of nearly 12,000 women in a private Facebook group and are trying to have Essure taken off the market.
Essure was approved by the FDA in 2002 when it was owned by Conceptus, and it is now owned by Bayer. But a problem women are facing is that they cannot sue for the thousands of dollars of medical expenses they have because of these tiny coils. Why? Because back years ago before it all began, Essure was given a FDA preemption.
Robert Jenner, an attorney with Janet, Jenner and Suggs in Pikesville said that “the idea behind preemption is that the companies that make approved devices get protection from the FDA and can’t be sued because the agency so heavily scrutinizes their devices.”
However, legal professionals disagree with this preemption because he continued, saying there’s “simply not enough money, not enough time and not enough people in the FDA to give it the oversight, the attention that it needs”.
Essure is still on the market, and women continue to share their stories after experiencing problems with this dangerous product. Find out how to report problems here.
To discover more natural alternatives to managing reproductive health which respect the dignity of all systems of the human body, visit here and here.
We deserve healthcare that won’t hurt us. Families deserve better than having unexpected medical problems they could have avoided. And ultimately, women deserve better than tiny metal coils that ruin their lives.
