Next month the birth control pill celebrates its 50th birthday in the United States. Since then, women’s choices in contraceptives have branched out from pills to patches and implants and injections and so on. Despite the many options now available, there are about 3.1 million unplanned pregnancies each year. Some speculate that women just don’t feel safe taking birth control.
Canadian Ann Schwoob was just 33 years old when she went to the hospital complaining of chest pains. She was diagnosed with pneumonia, but entered a second hospital days later where she was told she had suffered a pulmonary embolism, or a blood clot blocking the pulmonary artery that leads to the lungs. It could have killed her. But what took Schwoob by surprise was what caused the condition – her birth control pills.
A Montara, Calif., woman has filed a lawsuit against Bayer Pharmaceuticals claiming the drug maker’s behavior was “despicable and so contemptible that it would have been looked down upon and despised by ordinary people.” The plaintiff, Louise Thanos, says she took Bayer’s Yasmin birth control pill from November 2007 to November 2009 and ended up with major health problems, including gallbladder failure. Thanos says she was never warned that Yasmin could cause potentially life-threatening blood clots, gallbladder issues, and other health problems.
Vicki Parsons had been on the popular Yaz birth control pill for just three weeks when her life nearly came to an end. It started with a pain in her foot that just days later had her in the hospital. She was diagnosed with blood clots – one in her leg and the other in her lungs. It was an odd diagnosis for a young woman with no history of the health problem and no habits, like smoking, that made her more susceptible to blood clots. After a battery of tests, the doctors determined it was her birth control pills that triggered the clots.
