Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel member who voted to keep the birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin on the market despite studies that showed the pills put women at greater risk for deadly blood clots was praised by the drugs’ maker Bayer in a 2008 report saying, “She will be well utilized.” The adviser, Paula Hillard, M.D., with Stanford’s School of Medicine, is listed on the medical school’s website as a paid consultant receiving $5,000 or more annually from a division of Bayer.

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It didn’t make sense to Joan Cummins of Hackettstown, N.J., that her daughter Michelle Pfleger would drop dead. The college freshman died suddenly last fall, which was later determined by medical examiners to have been caused by a pulmonary thromboemboli, or blood clots in her lungs.

Cummins believes it was her daughter’s birth control pills, which she also took for the treatment of acne, that caused her death. She has filed suit against the Bayer Corp., makers of the birth control Yaz, and several of its divisions. The lawsuit was filed as part of a national class-action lawsuit against the makers of Yaz.

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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.

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