IUD Victim Who Fought Back Awaits Her $725 Apology

Any day now, Ida Mae McKinney expects, the check should come in the mail.

It will be for $725, which will help with the car insurance payment, but in the larger scheme of things, it really doesn’t seem like much.

Fifteen years ago, the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device almost killed her. And now the A.H. Robins Co., through a court-administered $2.4-billion fund, is apologizing, in a way, for the trouble that it caused her.

We’ve heard a lot about the Dalkon Shield. Millions of women used it for birth control in the early 1970s.

It was supposed to be a safe alternative to the pill, which, of course, was supposed to be a safe alternative to unprotected sex. Often, neither contraceptive worked quite as its manufacturer claimed.

At one point, attorneys for women who used the Dalkon Shield counted up to 330,000 claims against the company. At least 18 women died, hundreds had spontaneous abortions, others became sterile or gave birth to babies injured in their wombs.

Medical researchers later blamed the design of the device, which the company brochure had described as “generally well tolerated by even the most sensitive women.”

But the tiny string attached to the shield acted as a bridge to spread bacteria into the uterus. Infection was rampant.

McKinney, back then, had no idea about any of this. Doctors had always told her what was best, and she never imagined that it would not be so.

“I didn’t think to ask,” she told me as we sat in the kitchen of her Buena Park apartment. “You think doctors are gods. Well, they are not God. . . . Sometimes I laugh about it, so that it doesn’t get me down. But believe me, it wasn’t funny.

“If it hadn’t been for my family, I would have probably given up. . . . It would have been easy to close my eyes and let it go.”

I came to talk to McKinney, a shy, proud, 51-year-old mother of six, because what she had called “just another horror story” seemed to me more than that.

The horror--massive infection, a botched hysterectomy and a life-threatening hemorrhage--is certainly there, but so is her stark, common example of just how the marketplace works.

Product recalls, reluctantly sparked by design flaws that the marketplace cannot bear, are in the news quite a bit. Often, such as in the case of the Dalkon Shield, there are lawsuits. Manufacturers stress that their settlements don’t mean that they are at fault.

But guilty or not, people using the product do die--suddenly or in painful little steps. A gas tank explodes in a Ford Pinto, an Audi 5000 accelerates by itself or an O-ring, in a state-of-the-art space shuttle booster, simply gives way.

Now, we hear, the Jarvik artificial heart will no longer be for sale. “The risks to patients were outweighing the benefits,” the Food and Drug Administration declared, dryly and to the point, the other day.

This is how business is conducted in America, successful business that is. Emotions really have no place. You win some and you lose; you make mistakes. And someone, somewhere, hopes desperately that these mistakes will be corrected. Maybe the life of someone else can be saved.

McKinney, if everything goes according to plan, will receive the maximum amount available under Option I of the settlement of the class-action suit against A.H. Robins. That’s because, like an estimated 85,000 other women, she has few documents to prove her claim.

The doctor who inserted her Dalkon Shield, in Ohio, retired long ago; another who tried, unsuccessfully, to repair the damage moved to Europe. She has tried to find both without success.

“I didn’t know I had the recourse to sue,” she said. “It never occurred to me. It wasn’t until my daughter called, about four years ago when they were talking about this on TV, that I found out. . . . And quite frankly, I’m surprised that any of this got this far, given how businesses are able to get away with so much.”

McKinney said she was one of the lucky ones; she has her children and her life. For years now, she has had a steady job--as a security supervisor--and no longer needs the welfare check that helped her through her convalescence. Her illness took hold just as her $8,000 divorce settlement was running out and she was preparing to find a job.

“For me, I think, it’s the principle of the thing,” she said. “For so long, it was just trying to survive.

“If the president of Robins were to walk though that door and say, ‘Here, here’s $1. I’m really sorry,’ that would be the same thing. I look at this payment (from the class-action suit) as an apology. If I died, I don’t know what my kids would have looked on it as.”

As I was getting ready to leave, I asked McKinney why she had felt it important to let me know what had happened to her. She stared at me a minute, then said she really wasn’t sure.

Maybe, she said, it was just telling her story to a stranger, telling it out loud.

“It’s just a little story that doesn’t mean much to anybody,” she said.

Then I asked her about her children, and a sad half-smile spread slowly across her face.

“Yeah, maybe that’s it,” she said. “My grandmother told all of her 11 children to always turn the other cheek. And my mother basically told me never to make waves. . . . But this, this makes me angry.

“I want to set another kind of example to my kids. . . . They should always fight back.”