“Not on my skin” is the campaign to defend the rights and dignity of women who have suffered serious side effects after the implantation of the Essure coil, a permanent contraceptive marketed also in Italy until 2017
They are often not listened to or, worse, not believed: there are many times in which women who report problems related to their health are ignored or those in which the words with which they testify to their physical and emotional suffering are completely “erased”. . It happens often, it always happens.
And so, from chronic fatigue to abdominal pain, from decreased vision to depression, all the serious ones health issues faced by several thousand women who have had the Essure IUD implanted they almost went unnoticed. It is for this reason that Altroconsumo launches “Not on my skin”the campaign aimed at raising funds to support the costs of medical-legal assessments of women who suffered serious side effects after the implantation of that damned spiral.
To do this, the women who work at Altroconsumo have decided not only to “put their face”, but to lend their bodies to talk about the physical and emotional suffering that those involved in the affair had to face. For the realization of the campaign, therefore, they were written on their bodies some particularly impactful sentences taken from the testimonies of the protagonists: symptoms, emotions, damage experienced on their skin due to the use of the device.
The light shines on the words of the victims – the same ones who have often been belittled or unheard – so that it is no longer possible to ignore them and so that events like this are no longer written on the skin of other women.
The countryside
Altroconsumo’s lawyers followed around 150 Italian women among the numerous who have reported side effects following the Essure implant and are assisting pro bono the 18 of them currently involved in the civil case brought before the Court of Milan.
To ensure that they can obtain justice and proceed with the case, Altroconsumo has therefore started the crowdfunding campaign “Not on my skin”, with the aim of helping them face the huge legal costs: the initiative aims to raise the 70 thousand euros necessary to cover the costs of investigating the collective civil case and the party’s technical consultancy (medical reports) recently admitted to the hearing.
The Essure case
The Essure case began over 20 years ago and involved thousands of women around the world. An outpatient alternative to tubal ligation surgery, the permanent contraceptive device, patented by Conceptus Inc., later acquired and marketed by Bayer, was authorized in the United States and Europe in 2002, and was proposed as safewithout any risk margin for over a decade.
Over one million devices have been sold worldwide, 7,000 in Italy alonereimbursed in full by the National Health Service between 2004 and 2017, when Bayer suspended its distribution on the grounds of a decline in sales. After a few years of marketing the device, presented as harmless and without contraindications, cases of even serious health problems began to be recorded following the implant: chronic tiredness, dizziness, fainting, pain in the abdomen, joint pain and muscles, tooth loss, vision loss and, again, depression, temporomandibular symptoms, organ perforation. These are some of the problems reported by thousands of women who found themselves online, connecting the ailments they suffered from and giving life to an enormous international community.
Placed under observation by various national safety agencies, from the American FDA to the French ANSM to the Italian Aifa due to the growing reports in various countries around the world, Essure was then withdrawn from the market in 2017. In the meantime, only in United States Bayer has received several thousand lawsuits, after which the multinational has committed to paying “around one billion and 600 million dollars” to close “at least 90 percent of the pending lawsuits”.
