This is definitely not good.
Welp. This blows "the condom broke" excuse to bits. Allow us to contextualize.
So, it's just a regular Friday in 2011, and you've had a rough week and could use some purely hedonistic lovemaking to take the edge off. You're about to light some candles, subtly cue up Jay Sean's "Sex 101," lather yourself in some cotton-candy-flavored edible oil and get it on bareback with your boyfriend with 91% peace of mind that you'll see your next menstrual cycle by month's end, because you're on birth control, baby. Wonderful, magical birth control.
But, unbeknownst to you, is that instead of taking your hormone pills, you've been popping sugary placebo seeds down the hatch for the last week, and lucky you, it's your peak fertility time. Oops.
Sounds like every sexually promiscuous gal's worst nightmare, right? Good thing that such a horrifying, victimizing ordeal would never actually happen to anyone.
Oh, wait…
That really happened. To more than one woman. More like over a hundred women. And we're just finding out about it four years later, long after all these women experienced surprise pregnancies due to a birth control packaging mixup and were forced to deal.
Here's the damage: of the 117 women that issued a class action lawsuit against the responsible pharmaceutical company last week, 113 claim to have actually gotten pregnant due to the pill swap, and 94 of them gave birth to bundles of joy that they didn't plan to have. And you bet they're seeking justice. In the form of millions. Of dollars. Which is what it costs to raise 94 unintended babies in this day and age.
The story goes something like this:
Once upon a time in 2011, the evil birth control manufacturer Qualitest Pharmaceuticals was feeling especially evil one day and decided to exercise their rotten ways on the institute of female sexual freedom and non-suffocating penises. So what, exactly, did they fucking do? They released a big ol' batch of reversed contraceptive blister packs into the hands of America's daughters like big assholes. Then they sat back in their evil chairs and laughed maniacally with their evil pinkies glued to their pursed lips as they petted their creepy corporate hairless cat and waited to populate the world with surprise babies. Ugh!
Everything was going according to plan until one brave woman in Iowa returned a blister pack to her pharmacy when she realized that the placebo pills were in Week 1's row and not in their rightful place in Week 4.
To save face, the evil Qualitest Pharmaceuticals issued a recall on over 500,000 blister packs from eight (!) different brands of birth control pills. "Patient safety and product quality are at the center of everything we do," said some talking head at Pantheon, the company that packaged the pills. Yeah, we thought you'd say that, Pantheon head.
Anywho, by that point, it was too late. Let me put this in guy terms. If you don't know how birth control packs work, they typically distribute six months' worth of doses at a time, and with two of the four weeks being in ineffective slots, that's a total of three-months' worth of unintentional babymaking potential. And a lot of women had followed this defective dose regiment before a recall letter reached them.
Kristie Granado, a mother of two, had already been on birth control for a few years when the mixup happened. She got prego not once but TWICE in eight months and was all in a tizzy trying to figure out what in the bejeezus was up with her super-sly uterus that was causing it to act like kryptonite to her birth control … and THEN she received a letter.
For Granado, both surprise pregnancies sadly resulted in miscarriages. For 113 other women … ehh, not so much. And after a bunch of them tried to press charges separately and failed, they've finally come together like a justifiably angry mob to take QP down. Or at least get paid for their medical bills and the total cost of raising a kid to age 18.
No surprise, QP is defending themselves with all they've got.
Diana Aizman, a trial attorney, that was interviewed by CBS news and who was being a total succubus ice-queen about the whole thing, says, "It's gonna be really difficult to prove that a pregnancy is the result of a manufacturing error, because a lot of things go into the effectiveness of birth control pills."
Yeah, Di, things like the pills being birth control pills and not sugar cubes in the first place. While us kind-natured civilians think these women have a pretty good case, we'll let you know how things play out.
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