Crime Junkie - WHITE COLLAR: The Dalkon Shield

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

With the permission from the team over at Swindled Podcast, we are covering one of their best True Crime stories. It’s a story of lies.... cover-ups... and murder. But murder that was done out in the open while a company actually profited from women’s deaths. In today’s episode, we are discussing the Dalkon Shield, an IUD that killed at least twenty women, hurt hundreds of thousands, and is still being used overseas todayHuge thanks to Swindled Podcast for their research into this episode. Check out their episode, The Contraceptive, wherever you get your podcasts, or on their website SwindledPodcast.com, and follow them on Twitter @swindledpodcast and Instagram @swindledpodcastSources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/white-collar-dalkon-shield/   For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/.  

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm Ashley Flowers and I'm Britt and today we're doing something that I think is really exciting. There is a podcast that Britt and I are obsessed with. I love it so much. I know, you want to tell him the name? Yeah, it is an amazing show called Swindled and truly I think it's one of the most underrated shows and the host is probably tired of hearing me gush over his show but it is so unique, so well researched and so compelling. Swindled covers white collar crimes and I really think you all are going to love Swindled as much as we do. So what I thought is instead of just playing you a promo like we've done for other shows, I am going to tell you a swindled story so you can really get a taste for it. It's a story of lies, of cover-ups and of murder

but murder that was done out in the open while a company was actually making money off of their crimes. Swindled host was super generous and said we could redo one of his episodes Crime Junkie style. So I hope you all love this story as much as I did the first time that I heard it and by love it, I mean I hope it fills you with feminist rage and teaches you something you didn't already know. And Britt, this is one swindled episode that I told you not to listen to specifically because we were doing it. So are you ready to hear me tell it? Oh I'm so ready. It's been so difficult to not listen to this last episode that I had to skip. Okay then let's do this. This story starts with a woman named Barbara Seaman who published a book titled The Doctor's

Caste Against the Pill in 1969. You see the birth control pill had just been recently approved for general sale like just a decade earlier and the pill was an important milestone for women. I mean we had spent decades fighting for the rights to our own body and to be fair I feel like we still are but Barbara's book shed light on a ton of negative side effects that the pill had but no one was really talking about. See back when the pill was released it actually contained almost 500 percent more hormones than the pill that you and I are taking today and the side effects were very often like nausea, depression, weight gain, blood clots, and even strokes. Barbara's book wasn't something everyone 100% agreed with though. She also claimed that the pill caused

cancer, sterility, genetic defects, and this was all found to be untrue. But her book did cause enough of a stir that a senator out of Wisconsin named Gaylord Nelson held a hearing in April of 1970 on whether or not women had enough information about what they were putting into their bodies to even make an informed decision about it. You see it wasn't like getting birth control nowadays. When I go pick up my pill pack there is an entire like tiny booklet that comes inside of the box listing all the things that can go wrong. Do I ever read it? No I don't but it's there in case I need it and when I consulted with my doctor she sat me down and told me literally all the side effects of it. But back when birth control first came out there was none of this. No talk from

your doctor about side effects, no warning on the package, or in the package of birth control, like literally nothing. You had no way of knowing that these tiny pills could have serious side effects to your health and I have to assume the women that were taking them assumed that someone was doing their due diligence. Like there was no way the federal government was allowing people to just push out pills that they had never tested but that's exactly what was happening. So again because of this Gaylord Nelson holds what is later to be called the Nelson hearings. Now this hearing was a step in the right direction but I feel like I should point out of all of the people there that they end up hearing from that end up testifying about women,

about what they think women should know. I know where you're gonna go I think. About what women should or should not have in their birth control. Do you know who they don't ask? Women. Actual women taking the pill. Not a single woman got to speak about their experience with the pill. It was all from experts. A lot of men. Barbara Seaman was there but mostly men. So not a single woman got to speak about their actual experience taking this and there were a lot of protesters at the event for that very reason and the men inside who are actually making the decisions are just like shh no ladies we're trying to decide what's best for you here please be quiet outside. So I'm gonna jump ahead a little bit here just to tell you that two good things

did come from this hearing. The first is that a law was passed saying that packaging had to include some kind of pamphlet that told people the risks and side effects of their birth control. The second kind of good thing kind of bad thing is there was a pill scare across the nation and women started to avoid the pill and choose other forms of contraceptives. Now this introduces our next character. The thing that was really ugly that came out of this was during testimony one of the men who gets up to speak. One of the lead speakers in fact was a man named Dr. Hugh Davis. He was considered to be one of the most important medical authorities who gave credibility to Barbara Seaman's attack on the pill and this doctor gets up and says that yes the pills has

so many side effects and women would be far safer to use an IUD over the pill. Now an IUD is an interim uterine device and it's this small basically T-shaped birth control device that is actually inserted into the women's uterus and it prevents pregnancy so it's not a pill you take every day it's implanted usually for a couple of years and then removed when you're ready to have a baby. Now he was so passionate about IUDs when he was getting up there and testifying that one of the committee members asked him if he owned any of the patents on IUDs in the market and he mentions like just offhandedly that he did co-invent an IUD a decade earlier but it was never sold to the public like yeah he has no conflict here it's no big deal. He just thinks

it's a good option. Exactly he's like I'm I'm here just trying to do what's best for women and the committee member follows this up like kind of still pushing so he's like to be clear you have zero commercial interest in pushing IUDs like you're doing it for their well-being you gain nothing and he's like absolutely I gain nothing if these women all switched from the pill to an IUD but surprise he was freaking lying through his teeth he had recently invented a new IUD and when I say recently I mean like within the last few weeks sold it to a big pharmacy company and when he's testifying he knows that a percent of every IUD that he'd recently just sold to the big pharma he gets a percent of every single sale. Now to give you a little info on this Dr.

Davis guy a woman who worked for him once referred to him as the most efficient man she ever knew he literally preemptively removed his appendix so he would never get appendicitis and never have to miss a day of work and for everything I read about him he seemed kind of out there like a little I don't know if neurotic is the word but narcissistic he was really passionate about his work and specifically about family planning he viewed pregnancy as some kind of social evil and he said that the insane pregnancy rates were causing the population to explode and it was contributing to poverty and unrest and listen I don't disagree with that still to this day like we already know like this is the this is the bad guy in our story so like his views are bad but

listen you guys I don't know if any of you have read Inferno by Dan Brown but it feels like my manifesto and I know it's a fictional book it feels like a good point to plug in though it was a great audiobook that I listened to if you guys want to listen to it it's insanely wonderful you can go to audiblechild.com slash crime junkie you can get your free Dan Brown Inferno book so good but basically he kind of believed along the lines of this fictional book though is he believed the pregnancy rate was insane and it was almost his personal mission to stop it and part of the reason he was so passionate about this is because the 1960s there was a huge astronomical birth rate that would just baby boomers all over the place and he was so dedicated to this literally after

working a full day at the Baltimore Clinic where he was employed he would stay up all night well into the morning I mean we're talking three four o'clock in the morning trying to invent new forms of birth control in 1967 Dr. Davis and his friend Erwin Lerner and Erwin was a former electrical engineer they basically come together and they decide that IUDs at the time don't work they're not good they don't stay in place or they're causing really bad pains and cramps and bleeding and Dr. Davis knew that they could make something better and in August of that same year Davis and Lerner partnered together and complete a prototype of a redesigned IUD this IUD is round it was made of this flexible plastic material and had these spine like protrusions on the outside that would

actually prevent it from slipping or prevent it from dislodging and it had this durable tail it was like a string tail basically to help with removal of the IUD later on so getting it removed wasn't super painful it seemed really promising and it was working Davis started implanting this first version of his IUD into women at his own clinic and he started recording the results after looking at 640 patients over a year there was enough data he said to say that the pregnancy rate was 1.1% which was lower than any other competitor birth control out there on the market he published these results in the American Journal for Obstetrics and Gynecology and by 1969 word of this new IUD had gotten out and everybody was talking about it it was like the hottest thing on the market

a guy named Thad Earl hears about this and he's a doctor but he's also a salesman and he had been using IUDs in his patients and he started using Dr. Davis's and he was so thrilled with the result that he contacted Davis and Lerner and he basically offers them $50,000 of an investment and his sales experience in exchange for partial ownership in the company and they know you know neither one of them are salesmen so they bring this guy on they also bring on a lawyer and the four of them form the Daukan Corporation and they call this specific IUD the Daukan Shield selling the shield was actually super easy they would set up these demo booths like across the country in different clinics or at trade shows and literally just talk about the amazing miracle

that was the Daukan Shield how low the birth rates were passing out free samples and here's the thing at the time we're still talking about like the mid to late 1960s the FDA monitored actual medications stuff that you had to put in your mouth to put in your body but any kind of medical device like this the FDA didn't monitor at all and we're not just talking about birth control I mean if you put something a pacemaker into your heart the FDA had no say over it so basically there could be this single independent guy in his garage who makes an IUD and then passes it out to people to be put like in people at a hospital and everyone's like yeah that's cool oh my god it's a terrifying thought and again people had no idea they all just trusted that the government or some kind of health agency

their doctors were looking out for them they they would assume if there was no like evidence to back this up their doctor wouldn't put something inside of them but sure enough everyone's putting stuff inside of people with like little to nothing to back it up yeah it's just a blind trust situation yes it's terrible by 1970 multiple big companies wanted to purchase the Daukan Shield including a big Fortune 500 company called AH Robbins now AH Robbins had like a slew of different companies they were actually the owners of the chapstick brand of lip balm robotesum cough syrup random cosmetics here and there and what they didn't have was a contraceptive they had everything else so they needed this in their arsenal so the Daukan team sells Daukan Corporation to AH Robbins

for $750,000 in addition the four members get 10% of all gross sales in the US and Canada and the four men get up to $30,000 a year for serving as consultants to the company by 1971 the AH Robbins company launched an aggressive sales campaign they basically boasted this 1.1 pregnancy rate saying it was literally the ideal birth control you don't have to think about it especially for women who didn't want to have to worry about taking the pill every single day it's safer than the pill I mean they went on a crazy sales campaign and it was effective over the next three years they sold more than 2.2 million units alone in the US capturing more than 60% of the US market and they sold another 1.1 million overseas it was incredibly successful

incredibly profitable and the most insane part to me is the cost to AH Robbins was about 35 cents per IUD they ended up selling it to doctors offices for $4 in IUD and then the doctors went on to sell it to the patients for $12 in IUD so the markup on this was just insane everybody who was involved was making boatloads of money and this success would explain why the company dismissed early complaints about the Daukan shield early on one physician wrote to express his concerns about how painful the method of insertion was he said that you know he had been putting in these IUDs of all types thousands of them over many years and he said that this one was the most traumatic manipulation ever perpetrated on womanhood which is like the craziest quote I've ever heard

that's a very intense quote right and you know what not only was it apparently painful as hell Dr. Davis's 1.1% pregnancy rate claim was total bull it turns out the clinical trials that he conducted only lasted 5.5 months per patient which isn't enough time to actually arrive at a real rate if you're if you're testing a woman you think you'd want to do it over at least a full year and several test subjects said that Dr. Davis told them to use a spermacidal foam in addition to having the IUD in and guys I used to actually do scientific research as my day job so these test results are worthless if you're testing a birth control method and you're telling someone to use another one in conjunction with it totally write everything off none of it matters anymore

the integrity of the data has been compromised 100% but was AH Robin surprised by any of this that they found no they knew this before they even purchased the company apparently a doctor named Fred Clark had gone to Baltimore to observe Dr. Davis before they had actually purchased you know when they were scoping him out and according to his notes from the visit 26 of 832 patients had become pregnant while having the IUD placed and for anyone in the audience doing math that's not 1.1% that's actually 3.1% and later on lawyers claim from AH Robin that his notes were transcribed wrong by his secretary you know just another stupid woman getting in the way and he said that really it was supposed to say six out of 26 and so there's a lot of controversy was he lying was

it actually transcribed wrong but he's sticking by their story that the birth rate was super low AH Robins eventually did their own tests and they got a pregnancy rate of close to 2% but even this was fishy because two other well-respected medical facilities conducted tests around the same time and they found rates that were at 5.6 and 10% 10% is not good for a birth control like if anyone takes birth control if they were like there's a 10 chance you're probably going to get pregnant would you take it no absolutely no no so everyone basically just ignored this though AH Robins kept selling the Dalkins shield with these BS statistics all over their marketing and again they're allowed to do this because no one is monitoring them later

during a deposition this same doctor who said his notes were transcribed wrong Dr. Clark tried to distance himself from the acquisition of the Dalkins shield and basically redefine his involvement he flat out says that he wasn't involved and the lawyer keeps asking him like are you sure you weren't involved like you went out to go test to see if they should acquire this thing and you brought back notes and now you're saying you had nothing to do with it and he's like what like well what do you count as involvement because say my secretary sharpens a pencil and makes a note for someone who's looking up a number for somebody who wants to acquire is that involved like it's just gosh so convoluted round and round in like legal circles like a crazy person

but he had been heavily involved and he had actually ignored an internal memo six months before the product went to market and this memo expressed concern that that tail that I talked about to help take the IUD out this memo said that this tail could pose a serious danger to women and these multiple threads on the string could enable bacteria from outside of the body to travel up the string and enter the uterus kind of like climbing a rope or like the wick of a candle and the memo said that these could lead to mass infections and of course that's exactly what happened and I have to tell you this story more about this memo because I find it so fascinating and I was so furious when I was reading this so shortly after ah robins buys the dalcon shield

they were looking for ways to make it even cheaper so they move the assembly and packing to the same location as chapstick because they are the exact same thing in their mind oh I don't like where this is going and they have some of the employees from chapstick putting together these iud there's literally zero quality control and one man pointed out the issue with the string and this guy wasn't even a doctor he's in charge of quality control but he's like this doesn't feel right and I'm reaching home guy number two comes up and he's like no no no it's fine this outside of the string has this sheath material so the bacteria can't actually adhere to the string and guy number one who's in charge of quality control is like okay yeah I know the outside has this sheath

but are we not looking at the same thing because both ends of the string are open there's no sheath around that and he says the least you could do is cauterize both ends so that the string isn't actually exposed and then I think it would be fine they do that for shoelaces for shoelaces but those are on your feet who cares what's in your vagina and guy number two tells him no we can't do that because men have already complained that it's kind of uncomfortable for them to have sex with women who have the iud and we don't want to make it more uncomfortable for them girl girl do not get me started I know so guy number one is obviously skeptical of this like even if he has a penis and even he is like okay this doesn't seem right like as a part again shoelaces shoelaces

have this and he's like as a part of quality control he's like I'm gonna keep a close eye on things well what he finds is that later on there's even more carelessness by the chapstick people so as they're like putting all these things together what he finds is they're not being super careful and they're breaking holes in that protective sheath even around the string not just the ends when they go to male 10 to 12 thousands of these dalcon iud the sheaths in all of them had tiny holes so this quality control guy basically writes up like I'm rejecting all of these be sent out we cannot send these out knowing that there's holes where we think bacteria will get and could cause serious infection in women but everyone around this guy was trying to get these

things passed through anyways and there was a memo sent down this is the one that they said the guy ignored earlier that basically says like hey we know these things aren't perfect but we can send them out anyways because if we're being honest I think this is as good as it's gonna get the quality control guy like still won't give up he starts doing experiments of his own and he proves that this could freaking kill people like bacteria will get into the sterile uteruses of women so he calls his boss to show him and do you want to know what that butthole says to him probably something on the lines of it's not your concerned go away very close he says your conscious does not pay your salary that's worse though so much worse and so the shipment went out

and many more like it after that and do you want to know where a lot of the time and research like and development money went for ah robins probably not but you're gonna tell me all of their time spent like any improvements they were trying to make to the iud were all put into fixing the male sensitivity problem they wanted to make sure that men who were having sex with women who had these ids were as comfortable as possible i'm gonna be maybe a tiny bit crass and point out that if they didn't fix that problem their success rate would probably be a little bit better yes yes so while they're busy worrying about how to make sure men can have sex comfortably without getting us pregnant with no actual regard for a woman's well-being here's what else was going on

the fda was being flooded with reports from women who had used the dalcon shield and then suffered from pelvic inflammatory disease or blood poisoning and to give you one example there was a girl named linda tau and she was just 20 years old working as a secretary and she was very young she wanted to wait a few years before having kids and she actually went to dr. davis himself and got the iud inserted in 1970 and four months later she started having like really debilitating pain in her pelvis she was constantly bleeding and she kept calling dr. davis's office and he was like man you're fine totally normal don't even worry about it and she actually dealt with this pain for a year and then had the iud removed because she just couldn't take it anymore and

the iud while it was in was taking a toll on her physically i mean she was getting sickly looking she wasn't normal and almost immediately after getting the iud removed she began to look better but her reproductive health was damaged beyond repair and five years after having the dalcon shield removed she started having excruciating stomach pains and while on vacation in new york one day she had a severe fever and was rushed to the hospital and they found that her uterus was covered in adhesions and it had become almost completely and enveloped in scar tissue she had to have eight operations and her fallopian tubes had to be completely reconstructed and even after all of this she still was never able to have a child and the doctors told her listen if you're

ever going to have a child you're going to have to consider adoption because what that thing did to you you can no longer have a child of your own and linda was very torn up about this for years i mean it was a big part of her she'd always wanted to have kids and she scheduled an appointment with dr davis years later she wanted to go and confront him and she calls to make this appointment and when she was on the phone she just starts crying to the secretary saying you know i trusted him and he took away a part of my future and the secretary just said you know i'm i'm sorry she apologized and linda actually hung up the phone because she got what she always wanted she just wanted an apology from somebody and unfortunately linda would never get that apology from the

men really responsible for her situation and do you know who else didn't get an apology anyone the 327 000 women who suffered like linda now while all of these complaints are coming in the company ah robins starts victim blaming really hard and they basically said all of your pelvic inflammatory diseases and all of your blood poisoning is due to your poor hygiene and multiple sex partners i knew you were going to say promiscuity it's always that and they basically said listen we have no real reason to warn people against the potential hazards of this iud like it's kind of on you guys you guys should know better that's so messed up i know and as horrible as pelvic inflammation and blood poisoning was those were not the worst of the side effects medical reports

from some doctors actually found the shield floating freely in the abdomen cavity of some patients because it had actually ripped through the walls of the uterus and some women who got pregnant while still wearing the shield would often suffer from spontaneous or late term miscarriages while others gave birth to deformed or brain damaged babies and we know for sure at least 20 women died because of complications related to the dalcon shields now when i say 20 we know about 20 and the true number is most certainly higher because at the same time that these reports start flooding into the fda from 1971 to 1974 ah robins had made a deal with the government to send hundreds of thousands of these dalcon shields to third world countries and in order to offset their costs

ah robins cut costs for these in a certain way and do you even want to guess what they thought was an acceptable way to cut costs i don't even know anymore did they actually put shoe strings on them they might as well have what they decided was a good thing to cut is the sterilization portion of their manufacturing so basically they put together these devices and sent them out unsterilized so we already know this device is good for catching bacteria and is causing infections but now you don't even get to get a sterile device put into you to start with and it's being made by chapstick makers it's being made by the chapstick people and if 20 women in the us died how many died in other countries will probably never know the stats were never recorded

or made available and the federal government never issued a recall until 1976 two years after sales in america had stopped and of the 769 000 that were sent overseas fewer than half were actually returned and people say that if you still walk into clinics in some of these third world countries you can still see the dowel gun shield they are ready to be implanted in women to this day now as all of this was coming out about dr davis and about the dowel gun shield dr davis was convinced that this was all a smear campaign and none of this was real in today's terms he said it was all fake news and he said basically it was because there were new companies wanting to sell new iud's and his iud's were too popular so they had to get rid of him finally a h robbins buckled

under the pressure of citizen outrage and a pending recall from the fda and they suspended the sale of the dowel gun shield in 1974 and the company found itself to be the target of thousands of lawsuits the very first case settled in 1975 and a h robbins lost now they had an in-house council at the time the guy's name was robert tuttle and as soon as they lost they basically kicked tuttle to the curb and they hired a new law firm and this new law firm had two strategies about how they were going to be successful they either said one we are going to prolong the cases so long that these women will not be able to afford counsel and they'll have to drop out and we'll basically run them into the ground force them into bankruptcy or two if they keep going

we're just going to embarrass them we are going to get them on the stand and ask them all the terrible embarrassing questions about the deepest darkest secrets of their sex life and just make them feel mortified as a way to deter other people from coming forward now the defense in this actually kind of tries to turn the table with this second defense it turns out that the wife of one of the lawyers defending a h robbins had actually been a user of the dowel concealed and to prove a point about how outrageous their strategy was they put this lawyer on the stand and start asking him questions about his wife about his wife's gynecological appointments about his wife's sex life to try and get him to realize how unfair he was being to these other

women this lawyer didn't stop there he also goes on to ask like in a hypothetical situation he asked the like the person on the stand wouldn't you like to know if a medical product was dangerous before you actually use it and the guy's like yeah well i guess i would and it still doesn't stick so he actually puts it in penis terms which apparently is what these people need to hear to make the connection and he said would you want to know if one product was more likely to make your dick fall off than the other like would it matter to you if one in ten chance would make your dick fall off or five in ten chance and the guy's like you know one in ten is not so bad and the lawyer like you can hear the irole in his audio he's like okay i'm sure you would do something

that in one in ten chance your dick's gonna fall off so as the 1980s arrived and the legal battle was just getting started thousands of people joined together for a lawsuit there were still women wearing the dalkin shield because they never told their customers still so in 1984 a h robbins announced a program to warn women about the risks of the dalkin shield and they actually offered to pay for them to have it removed if they want to you know which is so nice for them it's literally the least that they can do but at this point 1984 it's a little bit too late court cases continue and there's a specific judge named judge lord in minnesota and he had actually 20 of these cases and he freaking hated a h robbins he accused them of selling an instrument

of death manipulation and disease and he said your company without warning to women invaded their bodies and caused injury to them he called them monsters and he said your corporate irresponsibility is at the meanest i've ever seen eventually he got removed because he had some mad bias even though i agree with his bias i would say i mean same but yeah and when all these trials were going on a h robbins cover-up was totally exposed do you remember that lawyer mr. tuttle who had actually got dismissed after he lost that first case yeah he comes back to testify and he confirms that the company had destroyed documents related to the dalkin shield and its inefficiency and how it was hurting women he said that he was instructed to destroy all of

the incriminating evidence and during the trial there's audio of this trial one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs can actually be heard in court saying can you believe this like it was unreal that it was coming forward and this was just the beginning of the end for them before all of these trials even finished they filed for bankruptcy in 1985 to actually avoid having to pay any future women which is also kind of disgusting 2.5 billion dollars of theirs was set aside for litigation but there were so many women that on average the women in the lawsuits took home less than one thousand dollars apiece despite all of this bull their stock prices still rose and they were sold to another company for three billion dollars and the owners of a h robbins

pocketed three hundred and eighty five million dollars tax free now technically none of the employees or you know corporate people at age robins had broken any laws so there was no punishment to the company or the employees and not even dr. davis who actually broke the law by perjuring himself gotten any trouble and this is what i was saying earlier literally these people were responsible for the death of at least 20 women that we know of likely more the sterility of hundreds of women and their punishment was that they all got to split 385 million dollars and go on to live their lives i am so infuriated by this whole story i'm sorry i keep interrupting just to say that but oh my gosh no i got so heated that's why i had to drink a barrel of wine before we

recorded this episode i was so upset now in the aftermath dr. davis's paranoia became uncontrollable you know he already thought everything was fake news everyone was out to get him he was afraid that the plaintiffs were gonna come after him so he wouldn't go anywhere without a bodyguard and he spent all of his free time trying to invent a new device that would redeem his reputation and he actually ended up being committed to a psychiatric facility where he remained for 10 years and according to his son it wasn't guilt or remorse that made him go crazy it was the fact that he was wrong he could not stand the fact that maybe he invented something that wasn't actually working he stood by his design until he died of pancreatic cancer in 1996 as a result

of this whole case this is what actually caused the FDA to change their rules and now they do have to actually approve medical devices thank god for a long time iud's plummeted in popularity and it's just now starting to like resurface again and i would say in the last 10 years that they're becoming a thing that is talked about is safe and is actually like a normal form of birth control used by a lot of women today but it took a lot to get here and it took a lot of women getting hurt i can't believe it took this much to get the FDA to actually care about what's being surgically placed into someone's body not just what they're following it took that long for women but if it were men how long would it take like call me a cynic but i feel like it would not

have gone on this long if the device only affected men well i mean even to that point it's 2018 and all men have their contraceptive are condoms and we're still the one having to implant things in our bodies and take chemical hormones to make sure we don't get pregnant so you know it's 2018 we've come a long way the FDA had made a lot of rules like a lot of good came from all of this bad but i don't but the mindset is still the same yeah i don't know how really far advanced we are if we're i mean we're still fighting for a lot of rights to our own body and we're still the only one pumping stuff into us to make sure we don't get pregnant so you guys i the first time i heard this story i loved it i got so fired up it was a story that

as much as i'm like into all of this feminist history i had never heard before so if you like this story again it's totally different from anything else that's out there you guys have to go check out swindled go download all the episodes go leave them a five star review leave us a five star review while you're at it i know for all of you who are supporting us on patreon that is amazing if you are financially unable to support us on patreon giving us five stars is very very close we need that just as much and if you guys want to follow us on social you can follow us at crime junkie podcast on instagram and at crime junkie pod on twitter and go to our website crimejunkiepodcast.com our store closed but we still have a couple of items you can get

like water bottles and mugs still for sale so go there get your swag check out our blog post and we will see you again next week for a brand new crime story today's episode was written and hosted by ashley flowers edited by me barat praywad with a special thanks to david flowers all of our music was written and recorded by justin daniel and our opening theme featured selections from swindled podcast crime junkie is an audio chuck production so what do you think chuck do you approve