The Daily Mail is reporting on the testimony of Kelly King from Greenville, Michigan who opted for the contraceptive implant, a small flexible tube inserted into the upper arm that slowly releases progesterone into the body for a period of three years. The hormones stop the release of eggs, thicken cervical mucus and thin the lining of the uterus to make it more difficult for sperm to travel into the cervix or for a fertilized egg to implant. The device can be removed at any time in a procedure that supposedly takes a few minutes, and a woman’s natural fertility returns shortly thereafter.
In Kelly’s case, she could only endure the device for a year.
“I felt so down I didn't want to get out of bed. It was hard to get up and go to work and take care of my son,” she told the Mail. “As soon as I would wake up I was instantly irritated with just being awake. I would get angry all the time. I'm not that type of person. It scared me. I didn't know what to do. I knew that something wasn't right with me but I couldn't pin point where it was coming from. I felt like I wasn't in control of how I felt anymore.”
Eventually, she realized the implant was to blame for her strange symptoms and decided to have it removed – but that was just the beginning of a whole new set of problems.
A procedure that was supposed to take 15 minutes turned into a two-hour torture session as healthcare providers struggled to find the device.
“They started pulling on my tendons and pulled a pea-sized ball of fat out of my arm, thinking they would be able to see it better but that didn't work. I was going pale because I was awake this whole time,” Kelly recalled. “I was watching them open my arm. They said, they weren't going to torture me anymore and told me to make a follow-up appointment.”
In other words, she was sent home with the device still in her body and no one knew exactly where it was.
The initial attempt to remove the implant, which took place in September of 2016, was so traumatic she dreaded seeing a doctor about it again but finally relented to an ultrasound in February of 2017. The device was found near her armpit.
“I didn't want to go back but it was my only choice,” Kelly said. “I thought it was better to take the chance then to sit here and be crazy.”
Given only a local anesthetic, the doctor was “digging around in there,” unable to find the device and “ended up cutting around an inch from my armpit.” It took at least half an hour to remove it.
'I'm trying to warn girls that this can happen,” Kelly said. “I didn't know how severe the symptoms could be. It did the same thing to my colleague. She literally went crazy. I've had so many messages from girls who have said they felt the same and their relationships have been on the line because they had been lashing out at partners for no reason.”
According to packaging, common side effects of the contraceptive implant include mood swings, weight gain, headache, acne, depressed mood and vaginitis. As Kelly found out, these side effects can be horrendous to the point of being disabling.
“I'm trying to raise awareness,” she says. “I want others to know they aren't the only people who are feeling like this and that they aren't going crazy. . . The majority of girls who have messaged me have said the same thing happened to them and it also got lost in their arm.
I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I'm not trying to scare them. It can possibly migrate and move. It happens a lot.”
We can only thank Kelly for her courage in speaking out and warning other women about the devastating effects of this form of injectable contraception. Originally developed by Wyeth-Aherst and marketed under the name of Norplant in 1990, within six years there were more than 6,000 adverse event reports filed by American women suffering from symptoms ranging from heavy bleeding to vision impairment and general malaise. Because this product was heavily distributed to women in the third world, many of whom were malnourished and in poor health to begin with, many of the women who had the implant went completely blind and some were bedridden for months. Ten-thousands lawsuits later, and very effective consumer awareness campaigns by organizations such as the Population Research Institute, finally convinced Wyeth-Aherst to take it off the market in the U.S.
But that wasn’t the end of the implants. Bayer came out with Norplant II in 1996 which it markets under the name of Jadelle. Two other implants, Implanon® and Nexplanon®/Implanon NXT®are also available to women in the United States.
Sadly, in spite of the dangers, the original Norplant is still being distributed to women in the third world.
Women have suffered through decades of subjection to dubious medical devices and drugs that have wreaked havoc on their bodies and prevented the birth of untold millions of children. And yet when the Church spoke out about the use of artificial birth control, it was roundly condemned as “backward” and “out of touch.”
“Though the backlash continues to this present day, the Church holds fast to her teaching that contraception is a great moral wrong because it violates God’s intention and purpose for the sexual act,” writes Johnnette Benkovic in her landmark study, Full of Grace: Women and the Abundant Life. “The two ‘goods’ of conjugal union are its procreative dimension and its unitive dimension. In other words, sex is, by its very nature, ordered to begetting of children and the bonding of the husband and wife in total self-giving love.”
We can only imagine how much suffering would have been averted, and how many lives would have been spared, if these teachings were taken to heart!
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