A notoriously dangerous birth control device reveals the extent to which the medical establishment disbelieves women’s pain.
For years, women warned each other not to use Essure. The birth control device — which was restricted and given a rare “black box warning” last week by the FDA — has been linked to a plethora of health problems, from fatigue to chronic abdominal pain to death. The FDA has received more than 26,000 complaints and reports of eight adult deaths linked to the device. The device has broken and left metal shards embedded in patients’ uteri. It has caused pain so severe that one woman told NBC News she used to weep in her sleep.
For a long time, the only way to have a frank and informative discussion about any of this was to talk to other Essure patients or log into a self-created online support group, like Facebook’s Essure Problems. Doctors were aware of the potential side effects, but, the FDA found, they weren’t actually informing patients about them, outside of handing them a pamphlet.
Essure has been on the market since 2002. Despite years of women telling stories about the catastrophic side effects they’d experienced, and even petitioning to have it taken off the market entirely—something some women are still doing: “We don’t want this offered as an option to any woman,” Lisa Saenz, whose uterus was perforated by the device, told NBC—it has taken nearly 20 years for their voices to have an effect.
In the #MeToo era, the call to believe women has become ubiquitous. It’s used, quite rightfully, in the context of sexual assault and harassment, where our tendency to dismiss women’s accounts of the harm they’ve suffered can give active cover to rapists and harassers. But our tendency to dismiss female survivors springs from a broader cultural tendency to find women’s voices less credible and less authoritative than men’s. We don’t just disbelieve women about rape, we disbelieve them about everything, up to and including their own bodies.
In fact, women and the health care establishment have been at odds for much of recorded history. Essure is not the only or the first instance of doctors just plain refusing to believe women’s pain. Stereotypically feminine ailments, like fibromyalgia (whose sufferers are 80 to 90 percent female) have been dismissed as mass delusions. Experiences as universal as menstrual cramps and PMS were thought to be imaginary until recently (and PMS still has its skeptics). In 2018, doctors determined the pain of cramping could be “almost as bad as a heart attack,” yet physicians were still being taught that over-the-counter drugs like ibuprofen “should be good enough.”
Even in emergency situations, women are routinely disbelieved.