Birth Control: Where did the diaphragm go? It just disappeared. The back story.

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/rise-and-fall-diaphragm?akid=14111.294211.TLAZua&rd=1&src=newsletter1053336&t=14

 few months ago, I went into a new OB/GYN’s office for an appointment. The nurse sat down with me to go over my information. She asked me what kind of birth control I was using.

“The diaphragm,” I said.

She looked up from her clipboard at that. “The diaphragm? They still make those?”

I laughed and assured her that of course they still make the diaphragm; it’s not going anywhere.

Except the nurse was right: Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s Ortho-All Flex, the most widely-used diaphragm on the U.S. market, had been discontinued three years earlier.

***

This was news to me, but it wasn’t news. Janssen quietly pulled the Ortho All-Flex off the market in December of 2013, leaving, at the time, only one diaphragm in the U.S. market. (That diaphragm, the Milex, was a different fit, and not all doctors were able or willing to prescribe it.)

The diaphragm, which in the earliest part of the 20th century was the most-used form of birth control among women in the U.S., was suddenly a lot more difficult to obtain.

I asked Janssen about the reason for the discontinuance. A spokesperson replied, in an email, that the diaphragm had been delisted because “comparable alternative products were available to women.” (A follow-up email, asking what the company meant by “alternatives,” went unanswered.) But for me, and for the tens of thousands of women who relied on the diaphragm even as it fell out of favor, the diaphragm has been a safe, effective form of birth control, one that doesn’t play havoc with hormones, and one that I was able to rely on without worrying about fighting for refills.

“I think it’s very unfortunate that Janssen has decided to stop manufacturing the Ortho All-Flex diaphragm,” says Dr. Vanessa Cullins, vice president of external medical affairs at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in an interview. “I understand that it is a business decision because there are not a whole lot of women who are demanding access to the diaphragm, but the diaphragm is a very important form of contraception for women who don’t want to have a hormonal form of contraception, who don’t want to have something that is inserted inside their uterus, who don’t want to potentially move to permanent sterilization.”