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

Health insurance plans will soon be required to cover birth control at no cost to women, thanks to new requirements ordered by the Obama administration. The new rules are part of a broad spectrum of women’s preventative coverage and include breast pumps for nursing mothers, an annual “well woman” physical, counseling on how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, and other services with no co-pay. Insurance companies can recoup any losses by increasing their premiums. The new benefits won’t go into effect for at least another year.

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Bayer is trying to silence the critics of its blockbuster birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin by taking nay-sayers to court. But even in Europe where the laws don’t always guarantee free speech, Bayer is hardly getting a sympathetic ear.

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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a generic version of two brand-name birth control pills. Emoquette, made by Huntsville, Ala.-based Qualitest Pharmaceuticals, contains the same hormones, desogestrel and ethinyl estradiol, as Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical’s Ortho-Cept and Organon USA’s Desogen.

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Stacey Gillis believes the “hype” about the popular birth control pill Yasmin causing young girls serious harm. She says Yasmin ruined her 19-year-old daughter’s life by causing a blood clot to form on the inside of her thigh. She now has to take a blood thinner, undergo constant blood work and monthly ultrasounds.

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A Canadian doctor’s group worries that the large number of lawsuits filed against Yaz and Yasmin birth control pills because of deadly side effects may cause young women to panic and not use contraceptives, resulting in unwanted pregnancies.

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Bayer HealthCare has launched another birth control pill packed with the hormone ethinyl estradiol, the diuretic drospirenone, and the B vitamin folic acid. The new oral contraceptive, called SAFYRAL, follows by three months the introduction of Beyaz, a near-identical pill packed with the same active ingredients. Folic acid has been shown to protect unborn babies against neural tube defects if the vitamin is taken regularly by women before and during the first three months of pregnancy.

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Just one month after Susan Gallenos began taking the birth control pill Yaz, she nearly lost her life to a stroke. Half her skull was removed to ease the pressure on her swelling brain. She would never be the same again. Her doctors blamed her birth control pill.

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The number of lawsuits against Bayer for its top-selling birth control pill, Yaz, has climbed to more than 4,200. The lawsuits allege that Bayer knew its pills put women at risk for blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks, a common side effect with any oral contraceptive. However, nearly half of the lawsuits against Bayer allege that the pills caused damage to the gallbladder and in many instances resulted in gallbladder removal. Bayer dismisses the notion that its pills can cause gallbladder problems and maintains its pills are no more dangerous than other oral contraceptives.

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Lawyers suing Bayer over the popular birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin have convinced Multi District Judge David Herndon to revise a previously negotiated privacy ruling in their favor. The new ruling, handed down on Sept. 22, prohibited the drug company from editing sales strategy information about contraceptives similar to Yaz and Yasmin in documents that it was required to deliver to plaintiffs. Workers must now pore through more than 30 million pages of information, find each redaction, and determine the reason why the document was altered.

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Last spring, Tara Jones gave into her dermatologist’s advice and agreed to take birth control pills to clear up moderate acne. Doing so almost killed her. “I had a deep vein thrombosis in my leg that broke off into many blood clots that traveled through my heart and into my lungs. If large enough, these clots, called pulmonary embolisms, could cause sudden death,” Jones wrote for BSU Daily.

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