Doctors fitting contraceptive devices without consent

[CyanCyan]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63863088

[…] In 2019, she discovered she had a coil inserted when a doctor found it during a medical examination.

"I was so shocked," she says.

The only time it could have been inserted without her knowledge, Mira thinks, would have been during minor uterine surgery she had in 2018.
She suffered intense pain for a year after the surgery. She says this was continuously dismissed by her doctor until a thorough check-up revealed the coil.
Mira, now 45, says the doctor told her the coil had pierced her uterus.

JFC. I remember this. Inhuman treatment. Eugenics.

I couldn't even finish reading that article. It's absolutely horrific.

That is horrific reading

Nowadays it seems like the countries we formerly regarded as most 'progressive' (Scandinavia, Canada, etc) are some of the worst. Just awful reading.

That is barbaric. So much suffering for nothing. I hope the older women do get to see justice. Apologies, but surely criminal charges too? Such awful violations and long term damage to physical and mental health of so many women.

Absolutely awful. Such a terrible violation

That's a dreadful story and reminds me of an experience with a London GP back in the 80s. It's not comparable in severity, obviously, but indicates an attitude to women.

I was in my mid-30s and it dawned on me, when a number of young women at work started getting pregnant, that I 'd never been vaccinated against rubella, or had rubella, to my knowledge. So I went to ask if I could be vaccinated, because you really don't want to risk causing that sort of harm.

The GP (need I say male?) said yep, fine, but I couldn't get pregnant for however-many-months it was. And so, as he couldn't "rely on me" not to do so, he'd only do it if I agreed to a 6-month dose of Depo-Provera. I refused, on the reasonable grounds that I was single, not in a relationship and - crucially - on the bloody pill, which he had prescribed! Not good enough. Wimmin can't be trusted.

On the way out, I booked an appointment with the only female doctor in the practice. She was even more furious than I was, took a blood-test for antibodies and had me vaxxed within the week. She said she'd had "very strong" words with him and mentioned it to all the men. And I changed GPs from him to her.

That’s disgraceful @Gonners. Twisted.

Nowhere near on the same scale but it irked me that during my isotretinoin treatment I had to visit a clinic once a month and pee in a cup for a nurse at a clinic so that they could do a monthly pregnancy test for the duration of the course, which was 12 months at a time (needed two rounds in the end). This was despite me being single and not sexually active, despite already having the Mirena IUD in place and despite signing a form to say I understood that getting pregnant while receiving treatment would result in foetal defects.

I get that they want to cover their backs as much as possible but it felt like it ultimately boiled down to ‘you can’t be trusted not to have sex’.

In my utopia all males would receive a vasectomy and have them reversed if they wished to have children.

I knew this would be Greenland. Denmark did some horrible stuff there.

If anybody wants to hear the original Danish podcast it's called spiral kampagnen.

Wow. That’s abhorrent. In the opposite vein, I remember a two-man GP surgery in the 1990s - at a time and in a place where even single-GP surgeries were common - who had big posters up saying as it was a Catholic practice, no contraception advice, prescriptions or referrals would be granted, and to find another GP if that was what you wanted. There were usually several other surgeries within a few hundred yards, so it didn’t really matter, but it was perfectly legal, and came under the “conscientious objection” clause.

That was to @Gonners btw.

Just what the actual??? That is utterly horrific.

That was the same as my family practice @MavisMcMinty although the two GPs were husband and wife. I changed practice when I went away to college and registered with a new practice when I finished. Friend at the same practice had a termination due to severe foetal abnormalities whilst away at college (the foetus had spina bifida and hydrocephalus) after initially deciding to keep the baby. When she reregistered with the aforementioned home practice the male GP read her transferred notes and gave her a 20 minute pro-life lecture.

That's quite jaw-dropping. Fuck off with that attitude.

This is really horrific.

Not the same at all but I've been denied the contraceptive pill by a male pharmacist even when presenting my doctors script.

I had misplaced my pack about mid way through so called the (small, local) GP who sent an emergency prescription to the pharmacy for me to pick up that day.

I had to have my female doctor call him and tell him to release the contraceptive and I changed pharmacies.

I still don't quite understand why he thought he was in a better position than the doctor to judge whether the prescription was necessary. I've also spent a few cross moments over the years wondering just exactly what he expected me to do with my "glut" of progesterone contraception to the tune of about 40-odd pills - if I ever found the missing half-pack which I didn't.

Maybe he imagined I would set up an illegal competing back alley pharmacy for... one customer? because that's the maximum amount of people I could possibly have supplied Or maybe he was worried I'd OD on them somehow, is that even possible?

Infuriating, infantilising and bloody sexist.

I googled the Lippes Loop device they were talking about. It's bloody huge. They were designed only for use in older women who had already had children and they were jamming these things in young women, some of whom ended up with a perforated uterus.
It's just sickening, the misogyny and racism of it.

It is. I remember my first coil insertion (Mirena). I wasn’t prepared for how awful it would be, I’d never felt pain like it in my life when it went in. I was on all fours in agony for two days after, as the uterus contracts to try to expel it. It turned out I had endometriosis on my uterus which won’t have helped the pain at all, but even without that I think most women find it very painful.

Yet they don’t offer pain relief for the procedure. They offer a local anaesthetic injected into the cervix but that’s very painful in itself. And if that’s what it was like numbed up I shudder to think what it would be like without. For my second insertion I begged for gas and air or to have it done under GA but they wouldn’t allow it. I cried while they were doing it as I was so scared it was going to be like the first time (fortunately it wasn’t as bad but it certainly wasn’t painless). They’re ramming an object into your uterus, the opposite of how it’s supposed to be ffs.

Exactly. It's completely barbaric.

It was much bigger than modern coils.

And they were putting it in VERY young women- often girls- without their consent or even telling them what the procedure was. Lots of kids were educated at boarding schools due to the distances involved and some of the schools would routinely get these huge IUDs inserted into the girl pupils as a matter of course (without explaining to the girls what they were doing).

So many women reported long-term agonising, debilitating pain. And there were stories from several women, who had grown up and got married, who'd being trying to get pregnant for years without success and it was only when they got further into fertility treatment / investigation that the doctors would find the IUD.

Absolutely awful.

It is unconscionable. Eugenics, yes. Paternalism, too. Just horrific.

I read the article this morning open mouthed

I hope people go to prison