This past summer, a few of my colleagues and I worked alongside the Brock Archives & Special Collections department to digitally archive all of The Brock Press’ physical volumes. Dating from September 1964 to March 2020, these issues covered 56 years of Brock history, much of which had been, up until that point, nearly lost to time.
The archives, a name we have fondly given to the nearly 30 shipping boxes collecting dust in our office, hold a wealth of knowledge. The Brock Press, which has had various names throughout its impressive 60 years of existence, has reported on a variety of topics, covering news specifically related to Brock as well as other issues impacting students that unfolded on the world stage.
This article will be the first in an ongoing series covering stories written by the era-defining reporters who came before me. Instead of following a linear progression, each week this series will cover stories relevant to current news and pertinent to student life.
This week, we will examine Margie Wolfe’s discussion of the IUD printed on Sept. 12, 1974, in Press volume 11, issue one.
In 2025, the intrauterine device, or the IUD, has become one the most popular methods of birth control. In a report about contraceptive use methods published in 2019, the United Nations stated that between 1994 and 2019, the “number of women relying on the IUD [had] risen from 133 million to 159 million.” This report also estimated that the IUD was used by a whopping 17 per cent of women of reproductive age (15-49 years), making it the third most common method of contraceptive globally behind female sterilization and male condoms. While it is unclear whether this report refers to all people assigned female at birth (AFAB) or simply people who identify as women, it still presents staggering data about the popularity of IUDs around the world.
In the United States, the IUD is also the third most common method of birth control used by AFAB people according to Dr. Tessa Madden. In fact, research completed by Megan Kavanaugh and Jenna Jerman in 2018 stated that more women in the U.S. are using an IUD now than ever before, with it being the contraceptive choice of approximately 4.4 million people, or 7.8 per cent of the country’s female population.
While the IUD is now a part of everyday life for many AFAB people in North America, before its rise in popularity in the early 2000s, the IUD saw its highest level of use in the early 1970s. This popularity was likely part of its novelty, yet a steep drop in the percentage of IUD use amongst all contraception users occurred around 1975 after a series of safety concerns caused the most popular form of the IUD at the time — the Dalkon Shield — to be taken off the market in June 1974.
In 1974, Margie Wolfe was a writer for The Chevron, the University of Waterloo’s official student newspaper. Her story “copper 7 contraception” was published in The Chevron and then consequently published in the Press (the name that The Brock Press operated under between 1970 and 1988). The re-printing of applicable students’ news from other universities in Ontario was a typical practice at the time, due to the Canadian University Press (CUP) operative. CUP allowed for a network of different newspapers to share stories with one another and our membership in CUP meant that a good portion of non-Brock news published in Press in the ‘70s was re-printed from other papers.
Wolfe’s article outlined the concerns that many IUD users felt following a disclosure from manufacturer A.H. Robins Co., which admitted to the death of six women and 36 infected spontaneous abortions mid-pregnancy with the Dalkon Shield in place.
Hugh J. Davis and Irwin Lerner introduced the Shield as a contraceptive option in 1968. The device was a plastic five-pronged, crab-like shield that contained trace amounts of copper which acted as a spermicide. Unlike the modern copper IUD, which Wolfe discusses further in the body of her article, the Dalkon Shield was placed directly into a person’s uterus to prevent pregnancy. Once production began under A.H. Robins Co., the device was marketed as a scientific marvel that was much safer than the pill and had almost perfect birth control protection. This marketing technique clearly worked as by 1970, over 600,000 Shields had been sold in the U.S and after three years on the market, physicians had prescribed the device to over 2.2 million women.
But by 1971, women using the Shield began to report suffering from septic infections and other dangerous complications that had resulted in them seeking serious medical attention. It soon became clear that the string that was attached to the Shield was not sealed at the end, causing it to fray and draw vaginal bacteria into the uterus. This complication resulted in not only septic infections, but miscarriages and various other related complications, including what is now approximated to be the death of 18 women.
A year before it was taken off the market, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted a study that gathered information from nearly 17,000 obstetricians and gynecologists about the frequency of hospitalizations and other complications that were related to the IUD. While it became clear that the Dalkon Shield was the most popular IUD on the market, the CDC concluded that the device could be correlated to an increased rate of pregnancy-related complications, including septic pregnancies and bacterial infections of the placenta or the fetus.
“Is there a type of IUD that is more effective than others? Are any of them safe?” Wolfe pondered in her article as she considered the IUD conundrum. At the time, the answer to this question was relatively unclear.
Wolfe quoted Dr. Alexander Morrison, Canada’s Assistant Deputy Minister of Health Protection in 1973, who stated that the government had “inadequate data on the safety of all IUDs.”
Wolfe also reported that “exactly how the IUD acts to prevent pregnancy is still a matter of speculation.” Even more important, she stated, is the fact that no one can provide straightforward data proving the Dalkon Shield is all that effective in preventing pregnancy.
“Also, a matter of guess work,” she wrote, “is the average number of complications, which range from minor complications such as IUD-induced pain to such major complications such as surgical intervention, severe infections and death.”
Most interesting is Wolfe’s commentary on the lack of pre-market government testing on the Dalkon Shield: as an IUD was considered a device and not a drug, it was not subject to the same kind of rigorous testing.
In 1976, two years after Wolfe published her article, the U.S. Congress passed federal legislation mandating that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would be required to test the safety and efficacy of IUDs prior to their approval for sale. The Canadian government followed suite and took similar precautions, halting the distribution and promotion of the Dalkon Shield all over Canada due to the lack of testing.
While Wolfe did not address the question of inadequate women’s healthcare head on, it was clearly on her mind. It should be on our minds too.
There are no clear numbers of the number of women who die each year due to ineffective health care, but there is clearly a problem. Throughout history, physicians and scholars have considered the male body to be the “norm” and the female body to be atypical, despite women making up almost half of the global population. This has resulted in devastating health care disparities, as women have been chronically excluded from clinical studies while still being subject to the same treatments that prove to be effective for men.
This problem was made even worse in 1977, when the FDA created a policy that omitted women of reproductive potential from Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials. This decision would soon be adopted by the health administrations of many other countries across the world, resulting in the gender disparity in health care growing even deeper.
This policy was a reaction to the side effects of a drug called thalidomide, taken by thousands of women in Europe and Australia for morning sickness, that was found to cause severe birth defects or even infant mortality. While it is astounding to think that government officials chose the safety of a potential baby over advancing the scientific understanding of the female body and improving the quality of women’s health care, it must be better now, right?
No, it isn’t.
In 2022, a study conducted by Harvard Medical School found that women were still substantially underrepresented in clinical trials. After the repeal of Roe v. Wade in the United States, we know that more women are suffering due to the new abortion laws. It is incredibly difficult to find maternal morality numbers associated with this repeal but The Guardian is one of many sources that report precise and accurate numbers of the increase in fetal deaths after the supreme court’s ruling. It is clear which group is thought to be more important.
Simply put, women’s health care is not and has not been considered a priority and because of that reality, I am in no way astonished that over 2 million Dalkon Shield IUDs were sold in the early ‘70s without proper medical testing. In fact, I can only laugh at the astonishing similarity to women’s health care today.
The National Cancer Institute acknowledges that there may be some correlation between oral contraceptives and cancer risks, but their research comes from observational studies and therefore cannot definitively establish that an exposure to birth control pills causes cancer. In 2019, the United Nations concluded that 152 million women were using the birth control pill, and somehow, we still don’t know for sure if it causes cancer?
While Margie Wolfe takes an informative tone in her article, speaking of the copper IUD and its better safety standards, she seems to have hope for the glimmering future of women’s health care.
Can we say the same?