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Killing Women in the Name of Reproductive Health

Killing Women in the Name of Reproductive Health

Last updated on: October 5, 2018 at 9:20 am by Rebecca Hamilton

Killing Women in the Name of Reproductive Health 2018-10-05T09:20:22-06:00 Rebecca Hamilton

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The IUD is making a come-back.

Thirty years after lawsuits concerning deaths, hospitalizations and infections from IUDs forced pharmaceutical companies into bankruptcy, the dangerous contraceptive crowd is back, pushing them at women again.

I just read an interesting 1974 CDC article assessing the risk of IUDs to women back then. The article was written early-on in the debate about the dangers of the devices. One statement stood out for me. The article blandly discusses deaths caused by the IUD and goes on to comment that the numbers were still insufficient to be statistically significant.

Excuse me, CDC. But you weren’t talking about a drug for cancer where the risk that some people with a terminal disease would die of drug complications might outweigh the good of other people living who wouldn’t otherwise. The IUD is an entirely unnecessary, totally elective form of contraception. If no one uses it, no one dies. Given that, even one death, one infection, one hospitalization or “loss of subsequent fertility” is far too many.

This easy acceptance of the idea that it’s ok to risk women’s lives with contraceptives is misogynist. Can you imagine any device that would cause men to cramp in their most intimate areas, give them infections in those areas, maybe make them sterile, or even kill them being bandied about so easily?

Can you imagine whole troops of politicians and medical practitioners calling this an advance in “men’s health” and bemoaning the fact that there aren’t more men willing to avail themselves of all this goodness?

Of course not. The thought itself is ludicrous. But when we do it to women, why, nobody even questions it.

IUDs are part of “women’s health.” The population control people have historically pushed IUDs in what we like to call Third World Countries, meaning, of course, people we patronize and manipulate without any requirements for responsibility or concern for their welfare.

If the misogynists in our medical/political professions don’t mind endangering women in the United States who have access to malpractice lawyers, then we have to assume that they really don’t mind endangering women in “Third World Countries” who can’t fight back. That’s how it seems and also how it plays out in real life.

That’s why we hear bizarre statements about how women in America are finally “catching up” with women in Mexico in their use of IUDs. Our population control people have been dumping these devices on women in Mexico for some time now. They’ve been the lab rats to see if the numbers of women who are injured by the devices will rise to the level of statistical significance.

We’ve turned some sort of corner regarding the use of hormones and devices to shut down women’s fertility. There was a time when we had an actual women’s rights movement who stood up and argued against these things. But now, the women’s rights movement is nothing but the abortion movement. It is so aligned with population control people, pornographers, gay rights advocates and the pro deathers, that it can not and will not speak out against the misogynistic practice of pushing dangerous birth control on unsuspecting women.

We have reached a time when the President of the United States is able to successfully market abortion and free contraceptives as women’s rights and the women’s rights movement supports him in doing this. No wonder the people who push dangerous birth control devices feel free to once again begin exploiting and endangering American women just has they do women in “Third World Countries.”

Between “lawsuit reform” from the right and the idea that women’s rights is nothing more than abortion and birth control from the left, it’s an open field day on American women once again.

LifeSiteNews published an interesting article about the growth of IUD use among American women. It reads in part:

November 20, 2012 (pop.org) – A growing number of American women are turning to intrauterine devices (IUDs), reports Lawrence Finer of the Guttmacher Institute. Of all American women using birth control, some 7.5 percent had IUDs implanted by 2009. These numbers were double what they had been a few short years before.

As befits an employee of a population control organization, Finer is pleased that women are choosing “long-acting” contraceptives over “short-acting, less effective methods.” Fertility delayed is fertility denied, as we say in demographic circles.

Most of the increase in IUD use has come from sales of Bayer’s levonorgestrel IUD, a so-called “second generation” contraceptive, which is marketed under the trade name “Mirena.” No surprise here. Since Mirena was approved by the FDA in 2000, Bayer has spent tens of millions of dollars advertising the IUD directly to the consumer.

The Mirena IUD can prevent conception, but it can also prevent a newly conceived embryo from implanting in the uterine wall.

As a result of this advertising campaign, Finer notes, “Women born in the United States appear to be ‘catching up’ to women born outside the United States, who already had a higher level of use, likely due to a greater prevalence of these methods in Mexico.”

The implication here is that women outside of the U.S. are more “advanced” in their contraceptive use than their benighted American sisters, but nothing could be further from the truth. The reason that IUDs are more prevalent in Mexico is simple: the Mexican government coerces women into accepting them. Either accept an IUD or have your tubes tied, new mothers are told. What would you choose?

The same is true of Finer’s factoid about high IUD use in China. The reason that 41 percent of women in China have IUDs is because China’s population control authorities insist that women either wear IUDs or be sterilized after they give birth. That’s not good news for women. Indeed, it’s not good news for anybody, unless of course you fear human fertility.

Bayer’s advertising campaign for Mirena, although expensive, has more than paid for itself. More than a million American women have been convinced to spend nearly $800 apiece buying the IUD. This has generated over a billion dollars in revenue for the German pharmaceutical giant, a good bargain by anyone’s calculation.

Bayer and other abortifacient contraceptive manufacturers also stand to make a lot of money from Obamacare. The HHS mandate will require all healthcare plans to cover the full range of contraceptive methods, including Mirena, at no cost to the patient. In other words, we taxpayers are about to make Bayer shareholders rich.

Finer refers to IUDs, including Mirena, as “contraceptive devices,” but IUDs act by aborting already conceived children, not by preventing their conception. An IUD is, in effect, a tiny abortion machine that prevents pregnancy by physically obstructing the normal process by which a tiny baby implants in the uterus of its mother.

Mirena, it is true, is more than just an IUD. It also contains a synthetic “hormone” called levonorgestrel that some months prevents ovulation. Even when what is called “breakthrough ovulation” occurs, the progestin sometimes still prevents conception by thickening the cervical mucus and preventing sperm from reaching the ovum. Still, when this doesn’t happen, a baby can be conceived and begin its 5 to 7 day journey down the Fallopian tube. But when it reaches the uterus itself it encounters the grim reaper in the guise of an IUD and its life is over. An early-term abortion occurs.

We should not forget the side effects, which fall into two different categories. Many women react badly to having their bodies laced with a powerful, steroid-based drug, levonorgestrel. Others find that having a foreign body lodged in their uterus can be an uncomfortable, even unhealthy, experience.

Finer claimed in an interview with Fox News that IUDs do not increase the risk of pelvic infection and jeopardize women’s future fertility.

But the list of unwanted side effects of Mirena is quite long. These include amenorrhea, intermenstrual bleeding and spotting, abdominal pain, pelvic pain, ovarian cysts, headache, migraines, acne, depression, and mood swings. The Truth About Mirena website contains hundreds of detailed accounts of such side effects by women who have personally suffered from them. It makes for grim reading.

One of the more dangerous side effects is that Mirena may become embedded into the wall of the uterus, or it may actually perforate it. In fact, there have been reports of the IUD actually migrating outside the uterus through a hole of its own making, there to cause scarring, infection, or damage to other organs. If the device embeds in or perforates the uterine wall, surgery will be required to remove it.

With all of these side effects, it is no surprise that the number of lawsuits is proliferating. If you type “Mirena” into your search engine, along with information about the IUD, a number of ads offering legal representation to those harmed by the device will pop up.

In the beginning, Bayer aggressively marketed Mirena to a “Busy Mom” demographic as a hassle-free form of birth control. But in 2009, the FDA issued a warning letter to Bayer after finding its Mirena promotions overstated the efficacy of the device, presented unsubstantiated claims, minimized the risks of Mirena, and used false and misleading presentations during in-home events touting the IUD. FDA berated Bayer for its so-called “overstatement of efficacy”, taking issue with marketing claims touting Mirena’s purported ability to improve a woman’s sex life and help her “look and feel great.” (Read more here.)

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