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In Chile’s arid Atacama Desert, Tabita Daza Rojas tries to raise enough money to finish building her house before her baby arrives, who is due to arrive one day.
Eight hundred kilometers to the south, in La Pintana, a suburb of the capital Santiago, Cynthia González is breastfeeding her 2-month-old boy. But she has to buy milk to supplement her body’s supply and is worried about how she is going to afford it.
Rojas and González come from different backgrounds, have different lives and ambitions. Yet they and at least 170 other women as of this writing share a common reality: They all claim to have become pregnant while taking Anulette CD, an oral contraceptive pill manufactured by Silesia, a subsidiary of German pharmaceutical company Grünenthal.
Without the possibility of legally terminating their pregnancy, if they so wished, nor any real responsibility on the part of the government or pharmaceutical companies, the women, represented by the Chilean sexual and reproductive rights group Corporación Miles, are preparing to institute a class action. in civil courts.
In a region where barriers to women’s reproductive rights are the norm, CNN has identified a government health agency quick to blame these women, along with a history of poor production and previous problems with oral contraceptives. in the Chilean Grünenthal plant, the gateway to Latin America.
The story of Tabita Rojas
In March 2020, after discovering an ovarian cyst that his doctor feared was caused by his contraceptive implant, Rojas’s doctor at his local health clinic advised him to take the pill instead, prescribing him Anulette CD.
Rojas hasn’t given the switch much thought; she had previously taken oral contraceptives and recognized that it made sense for her health.
What’s more, after giving up her place in a forensic criminology program at 17 because she got pregnant, the 29-year-old was once again excited about her future.
“I had to put it all aside and devote myself to my son,” said Rojas, who had a second child two years later and supports his family by doing seasonal work in a packaging factory. of grapes.
At the start of 2020, however, things were changing. Her 11 and 9-year-old boys, both with learning disabilities, were more independent and spent more time with their fathers. As part of the government urbanization of his hometown of Copiapó, Rojas was given a small piece of land on which to build a house. She had saved some money and was planning to move out of the home she shared with her children with three other family members.
And, she was in love.
At the start of the relationship, Rojas and her boyfriend had decided not to have children together. “It was going to be impossible to provide for someone else’s needs,” she said.
But in September 2020, just five months after Rojas started taking Anulette, she found out she was pregnant again. She would later learn, after seeing it posted on Facebook, that her tablets were from a batch that had been recalled by the Chilean public health authority, Instituto de Salud Pública de Chile (ISP) the previous month.
“I was about to finish the second
‘I was never happy with this pregnancy’
Details may differ, but similar scenarios have unfolded across Chile.
A mother of four, González, who had been on Anulette for eight months, became pregnant for the fifth time in May 2020.
She tells CNN that she took her contraceptive “religiously every morning,” before adding, “Because we women have set an alarm for these kinds of pills.”
The news devastated her. Her personal life was complicated and her finances extremely limited after losing the market stall where she sold second-hand clothes.
“I have never been satisfied with this pregnancy,” González said. “If you only knew all the nights that I spent crying thinking I didn’t want to [have the baby]. I had no option.
Referring to Chile’s strict abortion laws which prohibit a woman from terminating a pregnancy except for three reasons (if the pregnancy is the result of rape, if the fetus is incompatible with life outside the womb or if a woman’s life is in danger), González spoke of her anger and how she tried to hide her growing belly.
“I hid the pregnancy for a long time so they wouldn’t ask me, ‘Hey, another child, and who’s that because you’re no longer with your husband?’ And having to explain that we were separated. It was already a complicated situation for me, let alone telling everyone.
Anulette CD is a 28-day combined oral contraceptive, one of the most common forms of birth control.
It contains synthetic versions of the hormones estrogen and progesterone, which are produced naturally by the ovaries. Hormones work to prevent ovulation, which means that no egg is released from the ovaries and thickens the lining of the cervix to make it harder for sperm to pass through. The pill also makes the lining of the uterus thinner so that if an egg is fertilized it cannot implant and start to develop.
Pill regimens typically involve taking 21 “active” pills that contain the hormones and seven “non-active” or “placebo” pills, to maintain a daily routine, during which a person bleeds.
The first batch 139,160 packets of Anulette pills, according to its manufacturer, was recalled on August 24, 2020, after health workers at a rural health clinic complained that they identified 6 packets of faulty pills.
In them, based on information from the FAI, the placebo (a blue pill) had been found where the active pills (a yellow pill) should have been, and vice versa.
In its online notice, published on August 29, the FAI said the makers of Anulette CD, a company called Laboratorios Silesia SA (Silesia), had been made aware and were removing the defective batch. The FAI then advised the health centers to quarantine all the packages they contained from the affected lots.
Then, a tweet was sent from the ISP’s account alerting its subscribers to the recall. But without a nationwide campaign to educate the public more directly, the recall has gone largely unnoticed.
A week after the first recall, on September 3, the same error was detected in 6 packages from a different batch at a clinic in Santiago. Tablets were also missing here, but others were crushed, according to the ISP. At the time the problems were reported, Silesia said it had already distributed 137,730 packages to health centers.
This time, ISP said it will suspend Silesia’s registration until the lab is able to improve its quality and production processes. But it was too little, too late.
In total, according to the manufacturer’s own accounts, 276,890 packs of Anulette CD from the two defective lots, all with an expiration date of January 2022, had been distributed to family planning centers across Chile.
Surprisingly, on September 8, less than a week after Silesia’s suspension, the FAI released yet another document overturning its earlier decision. In the memo, which was uploaded to its website, the health authority said Anulette’s CD could be distributed again. He claimed that packaging defects could be easily detected and transferred the responsibility of doing so and educating service users on healthcare workers.
The Department of Health told CNN in an emailed statement that it had informed the public health department “to inform users of this situation and take appropriate action,” and said it was providing a support and advice to reproductive health workers to support affected by contraceptive quality issues. “
But Rojas said she was only told by her local clinic about the faulty pills after she underwent a prenatal checkup. And Rodriguez told CNN that no one has contacted her.
ISP Director Heriberto Garcia defended the decision to put Anulette back on the market, saying in a video interview with CNN: [one pack] belongs to the lot does not mean it was bad. “
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