The Dalkon Shield Failure

The Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine device (IUD) used to prevent pregnancy in the 1970s and early 1980s, was at the center of thousands of lawsuits yielding millions of dollars in settlements. Lawsuits targeted the makers of the Shield, affixing the blame for severe infections, miscarriages, and death on the device's design and questioning the research that surrounded its production and distribution. The Shield was a crab-shaped device with four to five prongs along both sides, a circular hole toward the top, and a tail string with knots at either end. The Shield, like other IUDs, was inserted by a physician into a woman's uterus, with the tail string hanging through the cervix into the vagina. The reason why IUDs in general, and the Shield in particular, work as an effective method of birth control is still undetermined, with popular theories speculating that the presence of a foreign object in the uterus either creates sperm-destroying white cells or keeps a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterine wall.

Despite the uncertainty about how they prevent pregnancy, IUDs have long been used as a method of birth control in both animals and humans. In 1968, Hugh Davis, a Johns Hopkins gynecologist, and Irwin Lerner, an electrical engineer, designed the Dalkon Shield as an improvement over existing IUDs. Lerner was cofounder of Lerner Laboratories, which later became the Dalkon Corporation. Davis and Robert Cohn, a Connecticut attorney, shared ownership in the company.