OBGYNs: why women are so shockingly in the dark about a device that affects millions of them.

The nurse practitioner who inserted my IUD worked with the precision and speed of someone on a pit crew. As Takeshita notes, at the first such gathering in 1962, the conference chairman, Alan Guttmacher, discussed the need for a contraceptive for the “masses”: Existing methods, he said, “are largely birth control for the individual, not for a nation.” The user’s experience in early IUD development was a secondary concern. The Dalkon Shield, the New York Times would later explain in its inventor Hugh Davis’ obituary, was “hailed as a scientific marvel, a highly improved intrauterine device … promising almost perfect birth control protection with virtually no adverse side effects.” In his 1971 book Intrauterine Devices for Contraception, Davis bragged about the device’s “pregnancy protection among young, highly fertile women”; he hypothesized that the plastic device’s large surface area and close contact with the uterus would boost its effectiveness. A 1985 article from the Washington Post cites a letter from a gynecologist to the device’s manufacturer in the weeks after it was first introduced: “I have just inserted my 10th Dalkon Shield,” he wrote, “and have found that procedure to be the most traumatic manipulation ever perpetrated upon womanhood.” Some reports note that compared to other devices, inserting the Shield took “10 times more force.” Still, the Shield quickly came to dominate the IUD market in the U.S. Three and a half years after its introduction, some 2.2 million women in America had a Shield inserted. Another Redditor wrote about a doctor refusing to help them switch from hormonal birth control to a copper IUD: “he had this very concerned face of like ‘why the hell do you want this,’ ” they wrote.